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R.L. STEVENSON 







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EDINBURGH 




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EDINBURGH 



P icturesque Notes 

by 

Robert Louis Stevenson 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 

BY 

T. HAMILTON CRAWFORD 

Member of the Royal Scottish Water Colour Society 



NEW EDITION 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-^57 Fifth Avenue 
1908 






Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 

bread street hill, e.c., and 

bungay, suffolk. 



4. 







■^ "—'^ ,„-Tu 1. J ,a i,\ k-SAlll. 








HIGH STREET 
AT THE 

CROSS WELL. 



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^ 

uo 

^ 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTORY 1 7 



CHAPTER n. 

OLD TOWN THE LANDS 49 

CHAPTER in. 

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 81 

CHAPTER IV. 

LEGENDS 107 

CHAPTER V. 

GREYFRIARS I35 

CHAPTER VI. 

NEW TOWN TOWN AND COUNTRY 159 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE VILLA QUARTERS l8l 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VIII. 



PAliK 



THE CALTON HILL 1 89 

CHAPTER IX. 

WINTER AND NEW YEAR 215 

CHAPTER X. 

TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 239 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



EDINBURGH CASTLE .... FrOlltlSptece 

ON THE NORTH BRIDGE .... 

HOLYROOD PALACE 

■ THE NEW TOWN, FROM THE CALTON HILL . 

PRINCES STREET 

THE LORD commissioner's LEVEE 

THE ARGYLE BATTERY 

A ROYAL PROCLAMATION .... 

THE university 

THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH .... 
the royal institution and national GALLERY 
THE CITY, FROM SALISBURY CRAGS 

SHOPS BY ST. Giles's 

THE CITY, FROM SALISBURY CRAGS 

THE CASTLE, FROM THE GRASSMARKET 

WARRISTON'S CLOSE 

vii 



PAGB 

19 

20 

21 

24 

25 
28 
29 

31 

35 
37 
38 
41 
43 
51 
55 



VUl 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



THE OLD WHITE HORSE INN, CANONGATE 
^HIGH STREET AT THE CROSS WELL 

DOORHEAD IN THE CANONGATE . 

DOORHEAD IN CANDLEMAKER'S ROW 

DOORHEAD IN LADY STAIR's CLOSE 

THE CANONGATE CROSS 
V A D^GRINGOLADE .... 
•OLD INHABITANTS OF THE HIGH STREET 

THE COWGATE, FROM THE SOUTH BRIDGE 

'^the interior of st. giles's 
john knox's study .... 
nSt. Giles's, from the parliament house 
^advocate and agent 

^THE PARLIAMENT HALL 

JOHN KNOX's HOUSE .... 
■ COCKBURN STREET .... 

^ THE LAWNMARKET .... 

^THE advocate's CLOSE — HIGH STREET 
' THE TWO SISTERS . . .. , 

'- HIGH STREET, FROM THE NETHERBOW . 

OLD BOW-HEAD, LAWNMARKET 

THE OLD TOWN, FROM THE ARGYLE BATTERY 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



IX 



' TOMBS IN GREYFRIARS .... 

TOMB IN GREYFRIARS .... 
*THE COMMUNION IN A SCOTTISH CHURCH 
^THE CASTLE, FROM PRINCES STREET 
^THE CASTLE, FROM THE SCOTT MONUMENT 

GEORGE STREET . 

THE ROYAL INSTITUTION 

PLANESTONE's CLOSE . 

THE VILLAGE OF DEAN 

regent's BRIDGE 

VIEW FROM THE DEAN BRIDGE 

THE CASTLE ROCK 

THE CALTON HILL 
' TOMBSTONE ERECTED BY BURNS OVER FERGUSSON' 

GRAVE IN THE CANONGATE CHURCHYARD 
^ THE CHAPEL ROYAL .... 

PRINCES STREET, FROM THE CALTON HILL 

GREENSIDE, FROM THE CALTON HILL . 
^THE OLD TOWN, FROM THE CALTON HILL 
> A NIGHT WITH FERGUSSON . 

THE CASTLE — RAIN .... 

QUEEN Mary's bath .... 



PAGE 

137 
141 

M3 

153 

161 

164 

165 

168 

170 

171 

172 
176 
190 

193 
197 

201 

205 

209 
219 

221 

224 



X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

duddingstone in winter 23 1 

^ craigmillar castle 233 

swanston cottage 250 

swanston farm • 252 

Arthur's seat 254 



INTRODUCTORY 



B 



EDINBURGH 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

'T^HE ancient and famous metropolis of the 
North sits overlooking a windy estuary 
from the slope and summit of three hills. No 
situation could be more commanding for the 
head city of a kingdom ; none better chosen 
for noble prospects. From her tall precipice 
and terraced gardens she looks far and wide 
on the sea and broad champaigns. To the 
east you may catch at sunset the spark of 
the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands 
into the German Ocean; and away to the 
west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can 
see the first snows upon Ben Ledi. 



i8 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high 
seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. 
She is liable to be beaten upon by all the 
winds that blov^, to be drenched w^ith rain, to 
be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and 
powdered with the snow as it comes flying 
southward from the Highland hills. The 
weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty 
and ungenial in summer, and a downright 
meteorological purgatory in the spring. The 
delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among 
bleak winds and plumping rain,, have been 
sometimes tempted to envy them their fate. 
For all who love shelter and the blessings 
of the sun, who hate dark weather and per- 
petual tilting against squalls, there could 
scarcely be found a more unhomely and 
harassing place of residence. Many such 
aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of 
the imagination, where all troubles are sup- 
posed to end^. They lean over the great bridge 
which joins the New Town with the Old — 



INTRO D UCTOR Y 



19 



that windiest spot, or high altar, in this 
northern temple of the winds — and watch 




On -tlie 

JNOJ^TH 



the trains smoking out from under them and 
vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to 
brighter skies. Happy the passengers who 



20 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have 
heard for the last time the cry of the east 
wind among her chimney-tops ! And yet 
the place establishes an interest in people's 
hearts ; go where they will, they find no ^ 




city of the same distinction ; go where they 
will, they take a pride in their old home. 

Venice, it has been said, differs from all 
other cities in the sentiment which she in- 
spires. The rest may have admirers ; she 




THE NEW TOWN, 

FROM 

THE CALTON HILL. J 



INTROD UCTOR Y 23 

only, a famous fair one, counts lovers in her 
train. And indeed, even by her kindest 
friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a 
similar sense. These like her for many 
reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory 
in itself. They like her whimsically, if you 
will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon 
his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in 
the narrowest meaning of the term. Beauti- 
ful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as 
interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic, and 
all the more "soT since she has set herself off 
with some Greek airs, and erected classic 
temples on her crags. In a word, and above 
all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of Holy- 
rood has been left aside in the growth of 
Edinburgh, and stands grey and silent in a 
workmen's quarter and among breweries and 
gas works. It is a house of many memories. 
Great people of yore, kings and queens, 
buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their 
stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars 



24 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep 
into the night, murder has been done in its 




Princes Street^ Edinburgh 



chambers. There Prince Charlie held his 
phantom levees^ and in a very gallant manner 
represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. 



INTRO D UCTOR Y 27 

Now, all these things of clay are mingled 
with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown 
for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone 
palace has outlived these changes. For fifty 
weeks together, it is no more than a show 
for tourists and a museum of old furniture; 
but on the fifty-first, behold the palace re- 
awakened and mimicking its past. The Lord 
Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits 
among stage courtiers ; a coach and six and 
clattering escort come and go before the gate ; 
at night, the windows are lighted up, and its 
near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in 
their own houses to the palace music. And 
in this the palace is typical. There is a spark 
among the embers ; from time to time the old 
volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly 
abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metro- 
politan trappings. Half a capital and half a 
country town, the whole city leads a double 
existence ; it has long trances of the one and 
flashes of the other ; like the king of the Black 



28 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental 
marble. There are armed men and cannon in 
the citadel overhead ; you may see the troops 
marshalled on the high parade ; and at night 




The Ai'gyie 
Batterx 



after the early wmter evenfall, and in the 
morning before the laggard winter dawn, the 
wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound 
of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit be- 




INTROD UCTOR Y 29 

wigged in what was once the scene of imperial 







deliberations. Close by in the High Street 
perhaps the trumpets may sound about the 



30 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

Stroke of noon ; and you see a troop of 
citizens in tawdry masquerade ; tabard above, 
heather-mixture trouser below, and the men 
themselves trudging in the mud among un- 
sympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a 
well-appointed circus tread the streets with a 
better presence. And yet these are the Heralds 
and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to 
proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom 
before two-score boys, and thieves, and hack- 
ney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the 
bell of the University rings out over the hum 
of the streets, and every hour a double tide of 
students, coming and going, fills the deep arch- 
ways. And lastly, one night in the spring- 
time — or say one morning rather, at the peep 
of day — late folk may hear the voices of many 
men singing a psalm in unison from a church 
on one side of the old High Street ; and a little 
after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of 
many men singing a psalm in unison from 
another church on the opposite side of the 




Univei^sity 






INTROD UCTOR Y 33 

way. There will be something in the words 
about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it 
is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. 
And the late folk will tell themselves that all 
this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly 
ecclesiastical parliaments — the parliaments of 
Churches which are brothers in many admirable 
virtues, but not specially like brothers in this 
particular of a tolerant and peaceful life. 

Again, meditative people will find a charm 
in a certain consonancy between the aspect 
of the city and its odd and stirring history. 
Few places, if any, offer a more barbaric 
display of contrasts to the eye. In the very 
midst stands one of the most satisfactory 
crags in nature — a Bass Rock upon dry land, 
rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains, 
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, 
and describing its warlike shadow over the 
liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the 
New Town. From their smoky beehives, 
ten stories high, the unwashed look down 



34 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

upon the open squares and gardens of the 
wealthy ; and gay people sunning themselves 
along Princes Street, with its mile of com- 
mercial palaces all beflagged upon some great 
occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with 
statues, where the washings of the Old Town 
flutter in the breeze at its high windows. 
And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of 
architecture ! In this one valley, where the 
life of the town goes most busily forward, 
there may be seen, shown one above and be- 
hind another by the accidents of the ground, 
buildings in almost every style upon the globe. 
Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces 
and Gothic spires, are huddled one over 
another in a most admired disorder ; while, 
above all, the brute mass of the Castle and 
the summit of Arthur's Seat look down upon 
these imitations with a becoming dignity, as 
the works of Nature may look down upon 
the monuments of Art. But Nature is a 
more indiscriminate patroness than we imagine. 




THE CANONGATE, 
TOLBOOTH. 



INTRODUCTORY 



37 



and in no way frightened of a strong effect. 
The birds roost as willingly among the Corin- 







The 
Royal Institution 

and 
National Gallery 




thian capitals as in the crannies or the crag; 
the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the 
eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico ; 



38 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

and as the soft northern sunshine throws out 
everything into a glorified distinctness — or 
easterly mists, coming up with the blue 
evening, fuse all these incongruous features 




^he Old Ciiy from Salisbury Crags 



into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along 
the street, and faint lights to burn in the high 
windows across the valley — the feeling grows 
upon you that this also is a piece of nature 
in the most intimate sense; that this pro- 



4 



INTROD UCTOR Y 39 

fusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry 
and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a 
theatre, but a city in the world of every-day 
reality, connected by railway and telegraph- 
wire with all the capitals of Europe, and in- 
habited by citizens of the familiar type, who 
keep ledgers, and attend church, and have 
sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. 
By all the canons of romance, the place de- 
mands to be half deserted and leaning towards 
decay; birds we might admit in profusion, 
the play of the sun and winds, and a few 
gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; 
but these citizens, with their cabs and tram- 
ways, their trains and posters, are altogether 
out of key. Chartered tourists, they make 
free with historic localities, and rear their 
young among the most picturesque sites with 
a grand human indiiference. To see them 
ihronging by, in their neat clothes and con- 
scious moral rectitude, and with a little air 

c 



40 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

of possession that verges on the absurd, is 
not the least striking feature of the place. "^ 

And the story of the town is as eccentric as 
its appearance. For centuries it was a capital 
thatched with heather, and more than once, 
in the evil days of English invasion, it has 
gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to ships 

* These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my 
native tow^n, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of 
Glasgow. I confess the news caused me both pain and 
merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded fellow- 
townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations ? 
Small blame to them if they keep ledgers : 'tis an excellent 
business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a 
subject of reproach ; decency of linen is a mark of pros- 
perous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the 
tokens of good living. It is not their fault if the city calls 
for something more specious by way of inhabitants. A man 
in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, 
although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of 
a Bentham. And let them console themselves — they do as 
well as anybody else ; the population of (let us say) Chicago 
would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same romantic 
stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, 
but that is of gold ; / have not y£t written a hook about 
Glasgow, 



INTRODUCTORY 



41 



at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous 
nobles, not only on Greenside or by the King's 
Stables, where set tournaments were fought 




■ — J r-fira:""rT — r\^\ ly^\. 

-s; .^ ,^ .^ W0^fW-^^ ^\ '-'•.':- 






i I m a'l ''^ fti if^! H^i '"• 





Shops by 
St. Giles's 



to the sound of trumpets and under the 
authority of the royal presence, but in every 
alley where there was room to cross swords, 
and in the main street, where popular tumult 



42 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

under the Blue Blanket alternated with the 
brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. 
Down in the palace John Knox reproved his 
queen in the accents of modern democracy. 
In the town, in one of those little shops 
plastered like so many swallows' nests among 
the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that 
familiar autocrat, James VI., would gladly 
share a bottle of wine with George Heriot 
the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, 
that so quietly look down on the Castle with 
the city lying in waves around it, those mad 
and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard 
from long exposure on the moors, sat day and 
night with ' tearful psalms ' to see Edinburgh 
consumed with fire from heaven, like another 
Sodom or Gomorrah. There, in the Grass- 
market, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes, 
offered up the often unnecessary, but not less 
honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade 
eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and 
earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll 



INTRODUCTORY 



45 



of drums. Down by yon outlet rode Gra- 
hame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, 
with the town beating to arms behind their 
horses' tails — a sorry handful thus riding for 
their lives, but with a man at the head who 
was to return in a different temper, make a 
dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, and 
die happily in the thick of fight. There 
Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of boyish 
incredulity ; there, a few years afterwards, 
David Hume ruined Philosophy and Faith, 
an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen ; and 
thither, in yet a few years more. Burns came 
from the plough-tail, as to an academy of 
gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, 
when the great exodus was made across the 
valley, and the New Town began to spread 
abroad its draughty parallelograms and rear 
its long frontage on the opposing hill, there 
was such a flitting, such a change of domicile 
and dweller, as was never excelled in the 
history of cities : the cobbler succeeded the 



46 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

earl ; the beggar ensconced himself by the 
judge's chimney ; what had been a palace was 
used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions 
were so parcelled out among the least and 
lowest in society, that the hearthstone of 
the old proprietor was thought large enough 
to be partitioned off into a bedroom by the 
new. 



II 

OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 



CHAPTER II 

OLD TOWN THE LANDS 

'T^HE Old Town, it is pretended, is the 
chief characteristic, and, from a pic- 
turesque point of view, the liver-wing of 
Edinburgh. It is one of the most common 
forms of depreciation to throw cold water on 
the whole by adroit over-commendation of 
a part, since everything worth judging, 
whether it be a man, a work of art, or only 
a fine city, must be judged upon its merits 
as a whole. The Old Town depends for 
much of its effect on the new quarters that 
lie around it, on the sufficiency of its situa- 
tion, and on the hills that back it up. If 
you were to set it somewhere else by itself, 



50 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

it would look remarkably like Stirling in a 
bolder and loftier edition. The point is to 
see this embellished Stirling planted in the 
midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern 
city ; for there the two re-act in a picturesque 
sense, and the one is the making of the 
other. 

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge 
or tail of diluvial matter, protected, in some 
subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs 
which fortify it to the west. On the one 
side of it and the other the new towns of the 
south and of the north occupy their lower, 
broader, and more gentle hill-tops. Thus, 
the quarter of the Castle overtops the whole 
city and keeps an open view to sea and land. 
It dominates for miles on every side ; and 
people on the decks of ships, or ploughing 
in quiet country places over in Fife, can see 
the banner on the Castle battlements, and 
the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad 
over the subjacent country. A city that is 




THE CASTLE, 

FROM 

THE GRASSMARKET. 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 53 

set Upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this 
distant aspect that she got her nickname of 
Auld Reekie. Perhaps it was given her by 
people who had never crossed her doors : day- 
after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, 
they had seen the pile of building on the 
hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over 
the plain ; so it appeared to them ; so it had 
appeared to their fathers tilling the same field ; 
and as that was all they knew of the place, 
it could be all expressed in these two words. 

Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old 
Town is properly smoked ; and though it is 
well washed with rain all the year round, it 
has a grim and sooty aspect among its younger 
suburbs. It grew, under the law that regu- 
lates the growth of walled cities in precarious 
situations, not in extent, but in height and 
density. Public buildings were forced, 
wherever there was room for them, into the 
midst of thoroughfares ; thoroughfares were 
diminished into lanes ; houses sprang up story 



54 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

after story, neighbour mounting upon neigh- 
bour's shoulder, as in some Black Hole of 
Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen 
or fifteen deep in a vertical direction. The 
tallest of these lands, as they are locally termed, 
have long since been burnt out ; but to this day 
it is not uncommon to see eight or ten v^in- 
dows at a flight; and the cliff of building 
which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge 
would still put many natural precipices to 
shame. The cellars are already high above 
the gazer's head, planted on the steep hill- 
side ; as for the garret, all the furniture may 
be in the pawnshop, but it commands a 
famous prospect to the Highland hills. The 
poor man may roost up there in the centre 
of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the 
green country from his window ; he shall 
see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms 
underneath, with their broad squares and 
gardens ; he shall have nothing overhead but 
a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the city ; 




warktston's close 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 57 

and perhaps the wind may reach him with a 
rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, 
or of flowering Ulacs in the spring. 

It is almost the correct literary sentiment 
to deplore the revolutionary improvements 
of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is 
easy to be a conservator of the discomforts 
of others ; indeed, it is only our good qualities 
we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, in 
driving streets through the black labyrinth, a 
few curious old corners have been swept away, 
and some associations turned out of house and 
home. But what slices of sunlight, what 
breaths of clean air, have been let in ! And 
what a picturesque world remains untouched ! 
You go under dark arches, and down dark 
stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that 
you can lay a hand on either wall ; so steep 
that, in greasy winter weather, the pavement 
is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing 
dangles above washing from the windows ; 
the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy 



58 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

brackets ; you see a bit of sculpture in a dark 
corner ; at the top of all, a gable and a few 
crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you 




Old 

white hoj^ss 
INN 



CANONCATE. 



come into a court where the children are at 
play and the grown people sit upon their door- 
steps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself 
above the roofs. Here, in the narrowest of 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 



6i 



the entry, you find a great old mansion still 
erect, with some insignia of its former state-— 




Door he ad in the Canongate 



some scutcheon, some holy or courageous 
motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary 
points out where famous and well-born people 



62 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

had their lodging ; and as you look up, out 
pops the head of a slatternly woman from the 
countess's window. The Bedouins camp 




Doorhead in Candlemakers' Row 



within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old 
war-ship is given over to the rats. We are 
already a far way from the days when 
powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys. 



OLD TO WN—THE LANDS 



63 



with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even 
in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings 



.^jiiiii 




Doorheaa in Lady Stair^s Close 

flutter at the windows, and the pavements are 
encumbered with loiterers. 

These loiterers are a true character of the 
scene. Some shrewd Scotch workmen may- 
have paused on their way to a job, debating 

D 



64 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

Church affairs and politics with their tools 
upon their arm. But the most part are of 
a different order — skulking jail-birds ; un- 
kempt, bare-foot children ; big-mouthed, 
robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped 
flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl : 
among these, a few supervising constables 
and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and 
broken men from higher ranks in society, 
with some mark of better days upon them, 
like a brand. In a place no larger than 
Edinburgh, and where the traffic is mostly 
centred in five or six chief streets, the same 
face comes often under the notice of an idle 
stroller. In fact, from this point o? view, 
Edinburgh is not so much a small city as 
the largest of small towns. It is scarce pos- 
sible to avoid observing your neighbours ; and 
I never yet heard of any one who tried. It 
has been my fortune, in this anonymous acci- 
dental way, to watch more than one of these 
downward travellers for some stages on the 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 65 

road to ruin. One man must have been 




The Canongate Cross 



upwards of sixty before I first observed him, 
and he made then a decent, personable figure in 



66 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

broadcloth of the best. For three years he 
kept faUing — grease coming and buttons going 
from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing 
and pimpHng, the shoulders growing bowed, 
the hair falling scant and grey upon his head ; 
and the last that ever I saw of him, he was 
standing at the mouth of an entry with several 
men in moleskin, three parts drunk, and his 
old black raiment daubed with mud. I fancy 
that I still can hear him laugh. There was 
something heart-breaking in this gradual de- 
clension at so advanced an age ; you would 
have thought a man of sixty out of the reach 
of these calamities ; you would have thought 
that he was niched by that time into a safe 
place in life, whence he could pass quietly and 
honourably into the grave. 

One of the earliest marks of these digrin- 
golades is, that the victim begins to disappear 
from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes 
to the High Street, like a wounded animal to 
the woods. And such an one is the type of 




A DEGRIXGOLADE 



«ari 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 69 

the quarter. It also has fallen socially, ^h^ 
scutcheon over the door soniew hat jars in \ 
sentiment where there is a washing at every 
window. The old man, when I saw him last, 
wore the coat in which he had played the 
gentleman three years before ; and that was 
iust what gave him so pre-eminent an air 
of wretchedness. 

It is true that the over-population was at 
least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, 
and that now-a-days some customs which made 
Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortu- 
nately pretermitted. But an aggregation of 
comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation 
of the reverse. Nobody cares how many 
lords and ladies, and divines and lawyers, may 
have been crowded into these houses in the past 
— perhaps the more the merrier. The glasses 
clink around the china punch-bowl, some 
one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' 
feathers on the chimney, and the tapers burn 
clear and pale in the red firelight. That is 



70 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become 
ugly upon repetition. All the better if the like 
were going on in every second room ; the land 
would only look the more inviting. Times 
are changed. In one house, perhaps, twoscore 
families herd together ; and, perhaps, not one 
of them is wholly out of the reach of want. 
The great hotel is given over to discomfort 
from the foundation to the chimney- tops ; 
everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty 
meals, and an air of sluttishness and dirt. In 
the first room there is a birth, in another a 
death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and 
the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon 
the stairs. High words are audible from 
dwelling to dwelling, and children have a 
strange experience from the first ; only a 
robust soul, you would think, could grow up 
in such conditions without hurt. And even if 
God tempers His dispensations to the young, 
and all the ill does not arise that our apprehen- 
sions may forecast, the sight of such a way of 



V 




s^S^;^ 



«S! 



pa 

'- P^ 

erf M ^ 

§ H M 

o ES t:;^ 

fa o K 



OLD TO WN^THE LANDS 



73 



living is disquieting to people who are more 
happily circumstanced. Social inequality is 




The Cow gate from the South Bridge 



nowhere more ostentatious than at Edinburgh. 



74 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

I have mentioned already how, to the stroller 
along Princes Street, the High Street callously 
exhibits its back garrets. It is true, there is a 
garden between. And although nothing could 
be more glaring by way of contrast, sometimes 
the opposition is more immediate ; sometimes 
the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not 
so much as a blade of grass between the rich 
and poor. To look over the South Bridge 
and see the Cowgate below full of crying 
hawkers, is to view one rank of society from 
another in the twinkling of an eye. 

One night I went along the Cowgate after 
every one was a-bed but the policeman, and 
stopped by hazard before a tall land. The 
moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone 
blankly on the upper windows ; there was no 
light anywhere in the great bulk of building ; 
but as I stood there it seemed to me that I 
could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from 
the interior ; doubtless there were many clocks 
ticking, and people snoring on their backs. 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 75 

And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within 
made itself faintly audible in my ears, family 
after family contributing its quota to the 
general hum, and the whole pile beating in 
tune to its timepieces, like a great disordered 
heart. Perhaps it was little more than a fancy 
altogether, but it was strangely impressive at 
the time, and gave me an imaginative measure 
of the disproportion between the quantity of 
living flesh and the trifling walls that separated 
and contained it. 

There was nothing fanciful, at least, but 
every circumstance of terror and reality, in the 
fall of the land in the High Street. The build- 
ing had grown rotten to the core ; the entry 
underneath had suddenly closed up so that the 
scavenger's barrow could not pass ; cracks and 
reverberations sounded through the house at 
night ; the inhabitants of the huge old human 
bee-hive discussed their peril when they en- 
countered on the stair; some had even left 
their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned 



76 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

to them again in a fit of economy or self- 
respect ; when, in the black hours of a Sunday 
morning, the whole structure ran together 
with a hideous uproar and tumbled story upon 
story to the ground. The physical shock was 
felt far and near ; and the moral shock 
travelled with the morning milkmaid into all 
the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded 
more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey 
forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest ; 
and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof 
destroyed many a home. None who saw it 
can have forgotten the aspect of the gable : 
here it was plastered, there papered, according 
to the rooms ; here the kettle still stood on the 
hob, high overhead ; and there a cheap picture 
of the Queen was pasted over the chimney. 
So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the 
life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from 
the revolving years. The land had fallen ; and 
with the land how much ! Far in the country, 
people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the 



OLD TOWN— THE LANDS 77 

sun looked through between the chimneys in 
an unwonted place. And all over the world, 
in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy 
what a multitude of people could exclaim with 
truth : * The house that I was born in fell last 
night ! ' 



Ill 

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 



CHAPTER III 

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 

' I ^IME has wrought its changes most 
notably around the precinct of St. 
Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were 
not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the 
Krames are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter 
in its buttresses ; and zealous magistrates and a 
misguided architect have shorn the design of 
manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully 
pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had in 
former days a rich and quaint appearance now 
forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling, 
sunless, and romantic. It was here that the 
town was most overbuilt ; but the overbuilding 
has been all rooted out, and not only a free fair- 



S2 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

way left along the High Street with an open 
space on either side of the church, but a great 
porthole, knocked in the main line of the lands^ 
gives an outlook to the north and the New 
Town. 

There is a silly story of a subterranean pas- 
sage between the Castle and Holyrood, and a 
bold Highland piper who volunteered to ex- 
plore its windings. He made his entrance by 
the upper end, playing a strathspey ; the curious 
footed it after him down the street, following 
his descent by the sound of the chanter from 
below ; until all of a sudden, about the level of 
St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, 
and the people in the street stood at fault with 
hands uplifted. Whether he was choked with 
gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed 
bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of 
doubt; but the piper has never again been seen 
or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he 
wandered down into the land of Thomas the 
Rhymer, and some day, when it is least ex- 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 85 

pected, may take a thought to revisit the sunUt 
upper world. That will be a strange moment 
for the cabmen on the stance besides St. Giles's, 
when they hear the drone of his pipes re- 
ascending from the bowels of the earth below 
their horses' feet. 

But it is not only pipers who have vanished, 
many a solid bulk of masonry has been likewise 
spirited into the air. Here, for example, is the 
shape of a heart let into the causeway. This 
was the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart of 
Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather 
to a noble book. The walls are now down in 
the dust ; there is no more squalor carceris for 
merry debtors, no more cage for the old, ac- 
knowledged prison-breaker ; but the sun and 
the wind play freely over the foundations of 
the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that 
the pavement keeps of former days. The 
ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay be- 
hind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to 
the Cowgate and covering the site of the pres- 



86 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

ent Parliament House. It has disappeared as 
utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths ; and 




jo>tN 

)(NOK 



for those ignorant of its history, I know only 
one token that remains. In the Parliament 
Close, trodden daily underfoot by advocates, 
two letters and a date mark the resting-place of 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 87 

the man who made Scotland over again in his 
own image, the indefatigable, undissuadable 
John Knox. He sleeps within call of the 
church that so often echoed to his preaching. 

Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and 
garlanded Charles Second, made of lead, be- 
strides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his 
back turned, and, as you look, seems to be 
trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous 
neighbour. Often, for hours together, these 
two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out of 
the way of all but legal traffic. On one side 
the south wall of the church, on the other the 
arcades of the Parliament House, inclose this 
irregular bight of causeway and describe their 
shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from 
round St. Giles's buttresses, you command a 
look into the High Street with its motley pas- 
sengers ; but the stream goes by, east and west, 
and leaves the Parliament Close to Charles the 
Second and the birds. Once in a while, a pa- 
tient crowd may be seen loitering there all day. 



SS PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper ; 
and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you 
would think they were waiting for a distribu- 
tion of soup-tickets. The fact is far otherwise ; 
within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon 
trial for his life, and these are some of the cu- 
rious for whom the gallery was found too 
narrow. Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is 
unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when 
he is brought forth. Once in a while, too, an 
advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, 
full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the 
arcade listening to an agent; and at certain 
regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries 
across the space. 

The Parliament Close has been the scene of 
marking incidents in Scottish history. Thus, 
when the Bishops were ejected from the Con- 
vention in 1688, * all fourteen of them gathered 
together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in 
the Parliament Close : ' poor episcopal person- 
ages who were done with fair weather for life ! 




ST. GILES S, 
FROM THE 
PARLIAMENT HOUSE. 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 91 

Some of the west-country Societarians standing 
by, who would have * rejoiced more than in 
great sums ' to be at their hanging, hustled 
them so rudely that they knocked their heads 
together. It was not magnanimous behaviour 
to dethroned enemies ; but one, at least, of the 
Societarians had groaned in the boots^ and they 
had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. 
Again, at the * woeful Union,' it was here that 
people crowded to escort their favourite from 
the last of Scottish parliaments : people flushed 
with nationality, as Boswell would have said, 
ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing 
stones at the author of * Robinson Crusoe ' as he 
looked out of window. 

One of the pious in the seventeenth century, 
going to pass his trials (examinations as we now 
say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament 
Close open and had a vision of the mouth of 
Hell. This, and small wonder, was the means 
of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuit- 
able to the locality ; for after an hospital, what 



92 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

Uglier piece is there in civilisation than a court 
of law ? Hither come envy, malice, and all 
uncharitableness to v^restle it out in public 
tourney ; crimes, broken fortunes, severed 
households, the knave and his victim, gravitate 
to this low building with the arcade. To how 
many has not St. Giles's bell told the Jfirst hour 
after ruin ? I think I see them pause to 
count the strokes, and wander on again into 
the moving High Street, stunned and sick at 
heart. 

A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a 
hall with a carved roof, hung with legal por- 
traits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by 
windows of painted glass, and warmed by three 
vast fires. This is the Salle des pas perdus of 
the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom, 
idle youths must promenade from ten till two. 
From end to end, singly or in pairs or trios, the 
gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through 
a hum of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of 
a Macer announce a fresh cause and call upon 




ADVOCATE A\D 
AGENT. 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 



95 



the names of those concerned. Intelligent men 
have been walking here daily for ten or twenty 
years without a rag of business or a shilling of 
reward. In process of time, they may perhaps 
be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of 
Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory. There is 
nothing required, you would say, but a little 
patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. 
To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the 
mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of 
a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with 
indescribable longings for the hour when a man 
may slip out of his travesty and devote himself 
to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to 
do this day by day and year after year, may 
seem so small a thing to the inexperienced ! 
But those who have made the experiment are 
of a different way of thinking, and count it the 
most arduous form of idleness. 

More swing doors open into pigeon-holes 
where Judges of the First Appeal sit singly, 
and halls of audience where the supreme Lords 



96 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

sit by three or four. Here, you may see 
Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote 
many a page of Waverley novels to the drone 
of judicial proceeding. You will hear a good 
deal of shrewdness, and, as their Lordships do 
not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair propor- 
tion of dry fun. The broadest of broad Scotch 
is now banished from the bench ; but the courts 
still retain a certain national flavour. We have 
a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. 
We treat law as a fine art, and relish and 
digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: 
point after point must be rightly examined 
and reduced to principle ; judge after judge 
must utter forth his obiter dicta to delighted 
brethren. 

Besides the courts, there are installed under 
the same roof no less than three libraries : two 
of no mean order ; confused and semi-subter- 
ranean, full of stairs and galleries ; where 
you may see the most studious-looking wigs 
fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 



99 




John Knox'i House 



very place where the old Privy Council tor- 
tured Covenanters. As the Parliament House 



loo PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

is built upon a slope, although it presents 
only one story to the north, it measures half- 
a-dozen at least upon the south ; and range 
after range of vaults extend below the libraries. 
Few places are more characteristic of this 
hilly capital. You descend one stone stair 
after another, and wander, by the flicker of 
a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, 
you pass below the Outer Hall and hear over- 
head, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pat- 
tering of legal feet. Now, you come upon a 
strong door with a wicket : on the other side 
are the cells of the police office and the trap- 
stair that gives admittance to the dock in the 
Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone 
up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy 
in the descent. Many a man's life has been 
argued away from him during long hours in 
the court above. But just now that tragic 
stage is empty and silent like a church on a 
week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and 
nothing moving but the sunbeams on the 




COCKBURN STREET. 



THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 103 

wall. A little farther and you strike upon a 
room, not empty like the rest, but crowded 
with productions from bygone criminal cases ; 
a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned 
organs in a jar, a door with, a shot hole 
through the panel, behind which a man fell 
dead. I cannot fancy why they should pre- 
serve them, unless it were against the Judg- 
ment Day. At length, as you continue to 
descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight 
and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; 
next moment you turn a corner, and there, in 
a whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt 
industriously turning on its wheels. You would 
think the engine had grown there of its own 
accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon 
spin itself out and fill the vaults from end to 
end with its mysterious labours. In truth, it 
is only some gear of the steam ventilator ; and 
you will find the engineers at hand, and may 
step out of their door into the sunlight. For 
all this while, you have not been descending 



I04 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

towards the earth's centre, but only to the 
bottom of the hill and the foundations of the 
Parliament House ; low down to be sure, but 
still under the open heaven and in a field of 
grass. The daylight shines garishly on the 
back windows of the Irish quarter ; on broken 
shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the 
brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit 
for human pigs. There are few signs of life, 
besides a scanty washing or a face at a window: 
the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at 
night and stagger to their pallets. 



IV 
LEGENDS 



CHAPTER IV 



LEGENDS 



' I ^HE character of a place is often most 
perfectly expressed in its associations. 
An event strikes root and grows into a legend, 
when it has happened amongst congenial 
surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly 
places, have the true romantic quality, and 
become an undying property of their scene. 
To a man like Scott, the different appearances 
of nature seemed each to contain its own 
legend ready made, which it was his to call 
forth : in such or such a place, only such or 
such events ought with propriety to happen ; 
and in this spirit he made the Lady of the Lake 
for Ben Venue, the Heart of Midlothian for 
Edinburgh, and the Pirate, so indifferently 



io8 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

vvritten but so romantically conceived, for the 
desolate islands and roaring tideways of the 
North. The common run of mankind have, 
from generation to generation, an instinct 
almost as delicate as that of Scott ; but w^here 
he created new things, they only forget what is 
unsuitable among the old ; and by survival of 
the fittest, a body of tradition becomes a work 
of art. So, in the low dens and high-flying 
garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back 
upon dark passages in the town's adventures, 
and chill their marrow with winter's tales 
about the fire : tales that are singularly apposite 
and characteristic, not only of the old life, but 
of the very constitution of built nature in that 
part, and singularly well qualified to add horror 
to horror, when the wind pipes around the tall 
lands, and hoots adown arched passages, and 
the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps 
quavering and flaring in the gusts. 

Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank- 
porter, stricken to the heart at a blow and left 



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LEGENDS III 

in his blood within a step or two of the 
crowded High Street. There, people hush 
their voices over Burke and Hare ; over drugs 
and violated graves, and the resurrection-men 
smothering their victims with their knees. 
Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is 
kept piously fresh. A great man in his day 
was the Deacon ; well seen in good society, 
crafty with his hands as a cabinetmaker, and 
one who could sing a song with taste. Many 
a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon 
to supper, and dismissed him with regret at 
a timeous hour, who would have been vastly 
disconcerted had he known how soon, and in 
what guise, his visitor returned. Many stories 
are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh burglar, 
but the one I have in my mind most vividly 
gives the key of all the rest. A friend of 
Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in 
one of these great lands^ had told him of a 
projected visit to the country, and afterwards 
detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed 



112 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

the night in town. The good man had lain 
some time awake; it was far on in the small 
hours by the Tron bell ; when suddenly there 
came a creak, a jar, a faint light. Softly he 
clambered out of bed and up to a false 
window which looked upon another room, 
and there, by the glimmer of a thieves' lantern, 
was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. 
It is characteristic of the town and the town's 
manners that this little episode should have 
been quietly tided over, and quite a good time 
elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a 
Bow Street runner, a cock-fight, an apprehen- 
sion in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last 
step into the air oflF his own greatly-improved 
gallows drop, brought the career of Deacon 
William Brodie to an end. But still, by the 
mind's eye, he may be seen, a man harassed 
below a mountain of duplicity, slinking from 
a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, 
and pickeering among the closes by the flicker 
of a dark lamp. 



The 

Anvo cage's 

Close . 

H i gli 




THE 

advocate's close. 



LEGENDS IIS 

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, 
perhaps some memory lingers of the great 
plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter 
within the memory of man. For in time of 
pestilence the discipline had been sharp and 
sudden, and what we now call * stamping out 
contagion ' was carried on with deadly rigour. 
The ofScials, in their gowns of grey, with a 
white St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, 
and a white cloth carried before them on a 
staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror 
of man's justice to the fear of God's visitation. 
The dead they buried on the Borough Muir ; 
the living who had concealed the sickness were 
drowned, if they were women, in the Quarry 
Holes, and if they were men, were hanged 
and gibbeted at their own doors ; and wherever 
the evil had passed, furniture was destroyed 
and houses closed. And the most bogeyish 
part of the story is about such houses. Two 
generations back they still stood dark and 
empty; people avoided them as they passed 



ii6 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

by; the boldest schoolboy only shouted 
through the keyhole and made off; for within, 
it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like 
a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain 
and pustule through the city. What a terrible 
next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens ! 
A rat scampering within would send a shudder 
through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, 
was a sanitary parable, addressed by our un- 
cleanly forefathers to their own neglect. 

And then we have Major Weir; for 
although even his house is now demolished, 
old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his 
unholy memory. He and his sister lived 
together in an odour of sour piety. She 
was a marvellous spinster; he had a rare 
gift of supplication, and was known among 
devout admirers by the name of Angelical 
Thomas. * He was a tall, black man, and 
ordinarily looked down to the ground ; a grim 
countenance, and a big nose. His garb was 
still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he never 



LEGENDS 119 

went without his staff.' How it came about 
that AngeHcal Thomas was burned in company 
with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner 
hanged, and whether these two were simply 
religious maniacs of the more furious order, 
or had real as well as imaginary sins upon 
their old-world shoulders, are points happily 
beyond the reach of our intention. At least, 
it is suitable enough that out of this super- 
stitious city some such example should have 
been put forth: the outcome and fine flower 
of dark and vehement religion. And at least 
the facts struck the public fancy and brought 
forth a remarkable family of myths. It would 
appear that the Major's staff went upon his 
errands, and even ran before him with a 
lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females, 
' stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees 
of laughter' at unseasonable hours of night 
and morning, haunted the purlieus of his 
abode. His house fell under such a load of 
infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until 



120 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

municipal improvement levelled the structure 
with the ground. And my father has often 
been told in the nursery how the devil's coach, 
drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, 
would drive at night into the West Bow, and 
belated people might see the dead Major 
through the glasses. 

Another legend is that of the two maiden 
sisters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in 
the most discreditable meaning of the term; 
or perhaps something worse — a mere yester- 
day's fiction. But it is a story of some vitality, 
and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh 
kalendar. This pair inhabited a single room; 
from the facts, it must have been double- 
bedded ; and it may have been of some 
dimensions : but when all is said, it was a 
single room. Here our two spinsters fell 
out — on some point of controversial divinity 
belike : but fell out so bitterly that there was 
never a word spoken between them, black 
or white, from that day forward. You would 




HIGH STREET, 
FROM THE 
NETHER BOW. 



LEGENDS 123 

have thought they would separate : but no ; 
whether from lack of means, or the Scottish 
fear of scandal, they continued to keep house 
together where they were. A chalk line 
drawn upon the floor separated their two 
domains : it bisected the doorway and the 
fireplace, so that each could go out and in, 
and do her cooking without violating the 
territory of the other. So, for years, they 
coexistea in a hateful silence ; their meals, 
their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed 
to an unfriendly scrutiny ; and at night, in 
the dark watches, each could hear the breath- 
ing of her enemy. Never did four walls 
look down upon an uglier spectacle than 
these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. Here 
is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned 
into a cabinet picture — he had a Puritanic 
vein, which would have fitted him to treat 
this Puritanic horror; he could have shown 
them to us in their sicknesses and at their 
hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair 



124 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each 
other's penitence with marrowy emphasis ; 
now each, with kilted petticoat, at her own 
corner of the fire on some tempestuous even- 
ing ; now sitting each at her window, looking 
out upon the summer landscape sloping far 
below them towards the firth, and the field- 
paths where they had wandered hand in hand ; 
or, as age and infirmity grew upon them and 
prolonged their toilettes, and their hands 
began to tremble and their heads to nod 
involuntarily, growing only the more steeled 
in enmity with years ; until one fine day, 
at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach 
of death, their hearts would melt and the 
chalk boundary be overstepped for ever. 

Alas ! to those who know the ecclesiastical 
history of the race — the most perverse and 
melancholy in man's annals — this will seem 
only a figure of much that is typical of Scot- 
land and her high-seated capital above the 
Forth — a figure so grimly realistic that it may 



n 




OLD BOW-HEAD, 
LAWNMARKET. 



LEGENDS 127 

pass with strangers for a caricature. We are 
wonderful patient haters for conscience' sake 
up here in the North. I spoke, in the first 
of these papers, of the Parhaments of the 
Estabhshed and Free Churches, and how they 
can hear each other singing psalms across 
the street. There is but a street between 
them in space, but a shadow between 
them in principle; and yet there they sit, 
enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray 
for each other's growth in grace. It would 
be well if there were no more than two ; 
but the sects in Scotland form a large family 
of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly 
drawn, and run through the midst of many 
private homes. Edinburgh is a city of 
churches, as though it were a place of pil- 
grimage. You will see four within a stone- 
cast at the head of the West Bow. Some 
are crowded to the doors ; some are empty 
like monuments ; and yet you will ever find 
new ones in the building. Hence that sur- 



128 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

prising clamour of church bells that suddenly 
breaks out upon the Sabbath morning, from 
Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on 
the borders of the hills. I have heard the 
chimes of Oxford playing their symphony 
in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful 
it was to hear. But in Edinburgh all manner 
of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one 
swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now 
one overtakes another, and now lags behind 
it; now five or six all strike on the pained 
tympanum at the same punctual instant of 
time, and make together a dismal chord of 
discord; and now for a second all seem to 
have conspired to hold their peace. Indeed, 
there are not many uproars in this world 
more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells 
in Edinburgh : a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin ; 
the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on 
every separate conventicler to put up a protest 
each in his own synagogue, against * right- 
hand extremes and left-hand defections.' And 




THE OLD TOWN, 
FROM THE 
ARGYLE BATTERY. 



LEGENDS 



131 



surely there are few worse extremes than this 
extremity of zeal ; and few more deplorable 
defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. 
Shakespeare wrote a comedy of *Much Ado 
about Nothing/ The Scottish nation made 
a fantastic tragedy on the same subject. And 
it is for the success of this remarkable piece 
that these bells are sounded every Sabbath 
morning on the hills above the Forth. How 
many of them might rest silent in the steeple, 
how many of these ugly churches might be 
demolished and turned once more into useful 
building material, if people who think almost 
exactly the same thoughts about religion 
would condescend to worship God under the 
same roof! But there are the chalk lines. 
And which is to pocket pride, and speak 
the foremost word ? 



GREYFRIARS 



CHAPTER V 



GREYFRIARS 



TT was Queen Mary who threw open the 
-■^ gardens of the Greyfriars: a new and 
semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it 
has grown an antiquity in its turn and been 
superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars 
must have had a pleasant time on summer 
evenings ; for their gardens were situated to 
a wish, with the tall castle and the tallest of 
the castle crags in front. Even now, it is one 
of our famous Edinburgh points of view ; 
and strangers are led thither to see, by yet 
another instance, how strangely the city lies 
upon her hills. The enclosure is of an ir- 
regular shape ; the double church of Old and 



136 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

New Greyfriars stands on the level at the top ; 
a few thorns are dotted here and there, and 
the ground falls by terrace and steep slope 
towards the north. The open shows many 
slabs and table tombstones ; and all round the 
margin, the place is girt by an array of aristo- 
cratic mausoleums appallingly adorned. 

Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, 
which belong to the heroic order of graveyard 
art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest 
among nations in the matter of grimly illus- 
trating death. We seem to love for their own 
sake the emblems of time and the great 
change; and even around country churches 
you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls, 
and crossbones, and noseless angels, and 
trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day. 
Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein : he 
had a deep consciousness of death, and loved 
to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard 
loiterer ; he was brimful of rough hints upon 
mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon 







■= / ' ' ■"■ ■ ■-— > # H? 












TOMBS IN 
GREYFRIARS. 



GREYFRIARS 139 

to be a text. The classical examples of this 
art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these 
were doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned 
of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries ; 
and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, 
the significance remains. You may perhaps 
look with a smile on the profusion of Latin 
mottoes — some crawling endwise up the shaft 
of a pillar, some issuing on a scroll from 
angels' trumpets — on the emblematic horrors, 
the figures rising headless from the grave, and 
all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased 
our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the 
dead and their sense of earthly mutability. 
But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each 
ornament may have been executed by the 
merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the 
mallet ; but the original meaning of each, 
and the combined effect of so many of them 
in this quiet enclosure, is serious to the point 
of melancholy. 

Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a 

G 



I40 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

low class present their backs to the churchyard. 
Only a few inches separate the living from the 
dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by 
the pediment of a tomb ; there, where the 
street falls far below the level of the graves, a 
chimney has been trained up the back of a 
monument, and a red pot looks vulgarly over 
from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard 
finds its way into houses where workmen sit 
at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes 
forward visibly at the windows. The very 
solitude and stillness of the enclosure, which 
lies apart from the towfi's traffic, serves to 
accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon 
the graves, you see children scattering crumbs 
to feed the sparrows ; you hear people singing 
or washing dishes, or the sound of tears and 
castigation ; the linen on a clothespole flaps 
against funereal sculpture ; or perhaps the cat 
slips over the lintel and descends on a memorial 
urn. And as there is nothing else astir, these 
incongruous sights and noises take hold on 



GREYFRIARS 



141 



the attention and exaggerate the sadness of the 
place. 

Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I 

e3* 




Gre'^friars^ 

have seen one afternoon, as many as thirteen 
of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, 
the Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and com- 



142 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

placently blinking, as if they had fed upon 
strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting 
with the saints, as we may hope, and cared 
little for the company about his grave ; but I 
confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me ; 
arid I was glad to step forward and raise my 
eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the 
Old Town, and the spire of the Assembly 
Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the 
colourless precision of engraving. An open 
outlook is to be desired from a churchyard, 
and a sight of the sky and some of the world's 
beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts. 
I shall never forget one visit. It was a 
grey, dropping day ; the grass was strung with 
rain-drops ; and the people in the houses kept 
hanging out their shirts and petticoats and 
angrily taking them in again, as the weather 
turned from wet to fair and back again. A 
gravedigger and a friend of his, a gardener from 
the country, accompanied me into one after 
another of the cells and little courtyards in which 




THE COMMUNION 

IN A 

SCOTTISH CHURCH. 



GREYFRIARS 145 

it gratified the wealthy of old days to enclose 
their old bones from neighbourhood. In one, 
under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn 
human effigy, very realistically executed down 
to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and hold- 
ing in his hand a ticket with the date 
of his demise. He looked most pitiful and 
ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristo- 
cratic precinct, like a bad old boy or an 
inferior forgotten deity under a new dispensa- 
tion; the burdocks grew familiarly about his 
feet, the rain dripped all round him ; and the 
world maintained the most entire indifference 
as to who he was or whither he had gone. 
In another, a vaulted tomb, handsome ex- 
ternally but horrible inside with damp and 
cobwebs, there were three mounds of black 
earth and an uncovered thigh bone. This 
was the place of interment, it appeared, of a 
family with whom the gardener had been long 
in service. He was among old acquaintances. 
* This'll be Miss Marg'et's,' said he, giving the 



146 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

bone a friendly kick. * The auld ! ' I 

have always an uncomfortable feeling in a 
graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to per- 
petuate memories best forgotten ; but I never 
had the impression so strongly as that day. 
People had been at some expense in both 
these cases: to provoke a melancholy feeling 
of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet 
in the other. The proper inscription for the 
most part of mankind, I began to think, is the 
cynical jeer, eras tibi. That, if anything, will 
stop the mouth of a carper ; since it both 
admits the worst and carries the war 
triumphantly into the enemy's camp. 

Greyfriars is a place of many associations. 
There was one window in a house at the 
lower end, now demolished, which was 
pointed out to me by the gravedigger as a 
spot of legendary interest. Burke, the resur- 
rection man, infamous for so many murders 
at five shillings a-head, used to sit thereat, 
with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials 



GREYFRIARS 147 

going forward on the green. In a tomb 
higher up, which must then have been but 
newly finished, John Knox, according to the 
same informant, had taken refuge in a tur- 
moil of the Reformation. Behind the church 
is the haunted mausoleum of Sir George 
Mackenzie : Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate 
in the Covenanting troubles and author of some 
pleasing sentiments on toleration. Here, in 
the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital 
boy once harboured from the pursuit of the 
police. The hospital is next door to Grey- 
friars — a courtly building among lawns, where, 
on Founder's Day, you may see a multitude 
of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and 
Round the Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the 
fugitive had managed to conceal himself in 
the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred 
opportunities to bring him food; and there 
he lay in safety till a ship was found to 
smuggle him abroad. But his must have 
been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day 



148 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

and night alone with the dead persecutor; 
and other lads were far from emulating him 
in courage. When a man's soul is certainly 
in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a 
tomb however costly; some time or other the 
door must open, and the reprobate come forth 
in the abhorred garments of the grave. It 
was thought a high piece of prowess to knock 
at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and 
challenge him to appear. * Bluidy Mackingie, 
come oot if ye dar' ! ' sang the foolhardy 
urchins. But Sir George had other affairs 
on hand; and the author of an essay on 
toleration continues to sleep peacefully among 
the many whom he so intolerantly helped 
to slay. 

For this infelix campus, as it is dubbed in 
one of its own inscriptions — an inscription over 
which Dr. Johnson passed a critical eye — is in 
many ways sacred to the memory of the men 
whom Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, 
on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was 



GREYFRIARS 149 

signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long 
arm of the churchyard that extends to Lauris- 
ton, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge — fed 
on bread and water and guarded, life for life, 
by vigilant marksmen — lay five months look- 
ing for the scaffold or the plantations. And 
while the good work was going forward in 
the Grassmarket, idlers in Greyfriars might 
have heard the throb of the military drums 
that drowned the voices of the martyrs. Nor 
is this all : for down in the corner farthest 
from Sir George, there stands a monument 
dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting verse, to 
all who lost their lives in that contention. 
There is no moorsman shot in a snow shower 
beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is not 
one of the two hundred who were drowned 
off the Orkneys ; nor so much as a poor, over- 
driven. Covenanting slave in the American 
plantations ; but can lay claim to a share in 
that memorial and, if such things interest just 
men among the shades, can boast he has a 



I50 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

monument on earth as well as Julius Cassar 
or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, 
I know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed ! But 
if the reader cares to learn how some of them 
— or some part of some of them — found their 
way at length to such honourable sepulture, let 
him listen to the words of one who was their 
comrade in life and their apologist when they 
were dead. Some of the insane controversial 
matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but 
leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language 
and orthography : — 

'The never to be forgotten Mr. yames Renwick told me, 
that he was Witness to their Public Murder at the Gallowlee^ 
between Leith and Edinburgh^ when he saw the Hangman 
hash and hagg ofF all their Five Heads, with Patrick Fore- 
marCs Right Hand : Their Bodies were all buried at the 
Gallows Foot ; their Heads, with Patrick^ Hand, were 
brought and put upon five Pikes on the P/^<?j^a«f^-P5r/. . . . 
Mr. Renwick told me also that it was the first public Action 
that his Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their 
murthered Bodies, and carried them to the West Church- 
yard of Edinburgh^ — not Greyfriars, this time, — ' and buried 
them there. Then they came about the City .... and 
took down these Five Heads and that Hand \ and Day being 



GREYFRIARS 151 

come, they went quickly up the Pleasaunce ; and when they 
came to Lauristoun Yards, upon the South-side of the City, 
they durst not venture, being so lignt, to go and bury their 
Heads with their Bodies, which they designed; it being 
present Death, if any of them had been found. Alexander 
Tweedie^ a Friend, being with them, who at that Time was 
Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them in his 
Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 
45 Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the loth of 
October 1681, and found the 7th Day of October 1726. 
That Piece of Ground lay for some Years unlaboured ; and 
trenching it, the Gardner found them, which affrighted him 5 
the Box was consumed. Mr. Schaw, the Owner of these 
Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his 
Summer-house : Mr. Schawls mother was so kind, as to cut 
out a Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days 
there, where all had Access to see them. Alexander Tweedie^ 
the foresaid Gardner, said, when dying, There was a 
Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither Gold nor Silver. 
Daniel Tweedie^ his Son, came along with me to that Yard, 
and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush above 
them, and ferther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which 
were more fruitful than any other bush in the Yard. . . . 
Many came ' — to see the heads — ' out of Curiosity ; yet I 
rejoiced to see so many concerned grave Men and Women 
favouring the Dust of our Martyrs. There were Six of us 
concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day of 
October 1726, and every One of us to acquaint Friends of 
the Day and Hour, being Wednesday^ the Day of the Week 
on which most of them were executed, and at 4 of the clock 



152 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

at night, being the Hour that most of them went to their 
resting Graves. We caused make a compleat Coffin for them 
in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the way that our 
Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly we kept the 
aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the 
Half of it below them, their nether Jaws being parted from 
their Heads ; but being young Men, their Teeth remained. 
All were Witness to the Holes in each of their Heads, which 
the Hangman broke with his Hammer ; and according to the 
Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the Jaws to them, and 
drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and stufFt 
the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow 
the chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution ; 
but this we refused, considering that it looked airy and 
frothy, to make such Show of them, and inconsistent with 
the solid serious Observing of such an affecting, surprizing 
unheard-of Dispensation : But took the ordinary Way of 
other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east the 
Back of the Wall, and in at Bristo-Port^ and down the 
Way to the Head of the Cowgate^ and turned up to the 
Church-yard, where they were interred close to the Martyrs 
Tomb, with the greatest Multitude of People Old and 
Young, Men and Women, Ministers and others, that ever 
I saw together.' 

And so there they were at last, in * their 
resting graves.' So long as men do their duty, 
even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, 
they will be leading pattern lives ; and 



GREYFRIARS 155 

whether or not they come to lie beside a 
martyr's monument, we may be sure they 
will find a safe haven somewhere in the pro- 
vidence of God. It is not well to think 
of death, unless we temper the thought with 
that of heroes who despised it. Upon what 
ground, is of small account; if it be only 
the bishop who was burned for his faith in 
the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart 
and makes us walk undisturbed among graves. 
And so the martyrs' monument is a whole- 
some heartsome spot in the field of the dead ; 
and as we look upon it, a brave influence 
comes to us from the land of those who have 
won their discharge and, in another phrase 
of Patrick Walker's, got * cleanly off the 
s-tage.* 



VI 

NEW TOWN— TOWN AND 

COUNTRY 



CHAPTER VI 

NEW TOWN TOWN AND COUNTRY 

TT is as much a matter of course to decry the 
New Town as to exalt the Old ; and the 
most celebrated authorities have picked out this 
quarter as the very emblem of what is con- 
demnable in architecture. Much may be said, 
much indeed has been said, upon the text ; 
but to the unsophisticated, who call anything 
pleasing if it only pleases them, the New 
Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only 
gay and airy, but highly picturesque. An old 
skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of 
the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as 
his most radiant notion for Paradise : 'The 
New Town of Edinburgh, with the wind the 

H 



i6o PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

matter of a point free.' He has now gone to 
that sphere where all good tars are promised 
pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his 
thoughts fly somewhat higher. But there are 
bright and temperate days — with soft air coming 
from the inland hills, military music sounding 
bravely from the hollow of the gardens, the 
flags all waving on the palaces of Princes 
Street — when I have seen the town through a 
sort of glory, and shaken hands in sentiment 
with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man 
who has been much tumbled round Orcadian 
skerries, what scene could be more agreeable 
to witness ? On such a day, the valley wears 
a surprising air of festival. It seems (I do not 
know how else to put my meaning) as if it 
were a trifle too good to be true. It is what 
Paris ought to be. It has the scenic quality 
that would best set off a life of unthinking, 
open-air diversion. It was meant by nature 
for the realisation of the society of comic operas. 
And you can imagine, if the climate were but 




THE CASTLE 

FROM THE 

SCOTT MONUMENT. 



NE W TO WN—TO WN AND CO UNTR Y 163 

towardly, how all the world and his wife would 
flock into these gardens in the cool of the 
evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant 
drinks, to see the moon rise from behind 
Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires and 
monuments and the green tree-tops in the 
valley. Alas ! and the next morning the rain is 
splashing on the window, and the passengers flee 
along Princes Street before the galloping squalls. 
It cannot be denied that the original design 
was faulty and short-sighted, and did not fully 
profit by the capabilities of the situation. The 
architect was essentially a town bird, and he 
laid out the modern city with a view to street 
scenery, and to street scenery alone. The 
country did not enter into his plan ; he had 
never lifted his eyes to the hills. If he had 
so chosen, every street upon the northern slope 
might have been a noble terrace and com- 
manded an extensive and beautiful view. But 
the space has been too closely built ; many of 
the houses front the wrong way, intent, like 



i64 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

the Man with the Muck-Rake, on what is not 
worth observation, and standing discourteously 
back-foremost in the ranks ; and in a word, it 
is too often only from attic windows, or here 




George Street 



and there at a crossing, that you can get a 
look beyond the city upon its diversified sur- 
roundings. But perhaps it is all the more 
surprising, to come suddenly on a corner, and see 



NE W TO WJSr—TO WN AND CO UNTR Y 165 

a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, 
and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue 
arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side. 




Hhe Royal Institution 



Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's 
model, once saw a butterfly at the Town 
Cross ; and the sight inspired him with a 
worthless little ode. This painted country 
man, the dandy of the rose garden, looked 
far abroad in such a humming neighbourhood ; 
and you can fancy what moral considerations 



i66 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

a youthful poet would supply But the in- 
cident, in a fanciful sort of way, is charac- 
teristic of the place. Into no other city does 
the sight of the country enter so far ; if you 
do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly 
catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your 
walk ; and the place is full of theatre tricks 
in the way of scenery. You peep under an 
arch, you descend stairs that look as if they 
would land you in a cellar, you turn to the 
back- window of a grimy tenement in a lane :— ' 
and behold ! you are face-to-face with distant 
and bright prospects. You turn a corner and 
there is the sun going down into the Highland 
hills. You look down an alley, and see ships 
tacking for the Baltic. 

For the country people to see Edinburgh 
on her hill-tops, is one thing ; it is another 
for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to 
overlook the country. It should be a genial 
and ameliorating influence in life ; it should 
prompt good thoughts and remind him 



NE W TO WN—TO WN AND CO UNTR Y 167 

of Nature's unconcern : that he can watch 
from day to day, as he trots officeward, how 
the Spring green brightens in the wood or 
the field grows black under a moving plough- 
share. I have been tempted, in this con- 
nexion, to deplore the slender faculties of 
the human race, with its penny-whistle of 
a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of 
sight. If you could see as people are to see 
in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can 
fancy for a superior race, if you could take 
clear note of the objects of vision, not only a 
few yards, but a few miles from where you 
stand : — think how agreeably your sight 
would be entertained, how pleasantly your 
thoughts would be diversified, as you walked 
the Edinburgh streets ! For you might pause, 
in some business perplexity, in the midst or 
the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye ot 
a shepherd as he sat down to breathe upon a 
heathery shoulder of the Pentlands ; or per- 
haps some urchin, clambering in a country elm. 



i68 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 
would put aside the leaves and show you his 




Planestones Close 



flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher racing 
seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, 



NE W TO WN—TO WN AND COUNTR Y 169 

and the sail sounding in the wind, would fling 
you a salutation from between Anst'er and 
the May. 

To be old is not the same thing as to be 
picturesque ; nor because the Old Town bears 
a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow 
that the New Town shall look commonplace. 
Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is curious 
how much description would apply commonly 
to either. The same sudden accidents of 
ground, a similar dominating site above the 
plain, and the same superposition of one rank 
of society over another, are to be observed in 
both. Thus, the broad and comely approach 
to Princes Street from the east, lined with 
hotels and public offices, makes a leap over 
the gorge of the Low Calton ; if you cast a 
glance over the parapet, you look direct into 
that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith 
Street ; and the same tall houses open upon 
both thoroughfares. This is only the New 
Town passing overhead above its own cellars ; 



170 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

walking, so to speak, over its own children, 
as is the way of cities and the human race. 







The Village of Dean 



But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a 
spectacle of a more novel order. The river 
runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among 



NEW TOWN— TOWN AND COUNTRY 171 

rocks and between gardens ; the crest of either 
bank is occupied by some of the most com- 




Regenfs Bridge 



modious streets and crescents in the modern 
city ; and a handsome bridge unites the two 



172 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

summits. Over this, every afternoon, private 
carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card- 
cases pass to and fro about the duties of society. 
And yet down below, you may still see, with 
its mills and foaming weir, the little rural 




View 

"DEAN ElRIOCe 



village of Dean. Modern improvement has 
gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and 
the extended city has cleanly overleapt, and 
left unaltered, what was once the summer 
retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town 
embraces hamlets in its growth ; Edinburgh 



NE W TO WN—TO WN AND COUNTR V 173 

herself has embraced a good few; but it is 
strange to see one still surviving — and to see it 
some hundreds of feet below your path. Is 
it Torre del Greco that is built above buried 
Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at 
least ; but the sun still shines upon the roofs 
of Dean ; the smoke still rises thriftily from 
its chimneys ; the dusty miller comes to his 
door, looks at the gurgling water, hearkens 
to the turning wheel and the birds about the 
shed, and perhaps whistles an air of his own 
to enrich the symphony — for all the world 
as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh 
on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the 
quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the 
green country. 

It is not so long ago since magisterial David 
Hume lent the authority of his example to 
the exodus from the Old Town, and took up 
his new abode in a street which is still (so 
oddly may a jest become perpetuated) known 
as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so 



174 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

large but a holiday schoolboy may harry a 
bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. 
There are places that still smell of the plough 
in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a 
blackbird on a hawthorn ; there, another was 
taken on summer evenings to eat strawberries 
and cream; and you have seen a waving 
wheatfield on the site of your present residence. 
The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but 
partly memories of the town, I look back 
with delight on many an escalade of garden 
walls; many a ramble among lilacs full of 
piping birds ; many an exploration in obscure 
quarters that were neither town nor country ; 
and I think that both for my companions and 
myself, there was a special interest, a point of 
romance, and a sentiment as of foreign travel, 
when we hit in our excursions on the butt-end 
of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic 
cottages embedded among streets and squares. 
The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the 
sight of the trains shooting out of its dark 



NEW TOWN— TOWN AND COUNTRY 175 

maw with the two guards upon the brake, the 
thought of its length and the many ponderous 
edifices and open thoroughfares above, were 
certainly things of paramount impressiveness 
to a young mind. It was a subterranean pas- 
sage, although of a larger bore than we were 
accustomed to in Ainsworth's novels; and 
these two words, * subterranean passage,' were 
in themselves an irresistible attraction, and 
seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes 
we loved and the black rascals we secretly 
aspired to imitate. To scale the Castle Rock 
from West Princes Street Gardens, and lay 
a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, 
was to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. 
And there are other sights and exploits which 
crowd back upon my mind under a very 
strong illumination of remembered pleasure. 
But the effect of not one of them all will 
compare with the discoverer's joy, and the 
sense of old Time and his slow changes on 
the face of this earth, with which I explored 



176 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

such corners as Cannonmills or Water Lane, 
or the nugget of cottages at Broughton 



''\£.^./.. > 




Market. They were more rural than the 
open country, and gave a greater impression 



NE W TO WN—TO WN AND COUNTR V 177 

of antiquity than the oldest /and upon the 

High Street. They too, like Fergusson's 

butterfly, had a quaint air of having wandered 

far from their own place ; they looked abashed 

and homely, with their gables and their 

creeping plants, their outside stairs and 

running mill-streams ; there were corners 

that smelt like the end of the country garden 

where I spent my Aprils; and the people 

stood to gossip at their doors, as they might 

have done in Colinton or Cramond. 

In a great measure we may, and shall, 

eradicate this haunting flavour of the country. 

The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the 

villas and the workmen's quarters spread apace 

on all the borders of the city. We can cut 

down the trees; we can bury the grass under 

dead paving-stones ; we can drive brisk streets 

through all our sleepy quarters ; and we may 

forget the stories and the playgrounds of our 

boyhood. But we have some possessions that 

not even the infuriate zeal of builders can 

I 



178 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

Utterly abolish and destroy. Nothing can 
abolish the hills, unless it be a cataclysm of 
nature which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle 
itself and lay all her florid structures in the 
dust. And as long as we have the hills and 
the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave 
our children. Our windows, at no expense 
to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent 
a landscape. And when the Spring comes 
round, and the hawthorn begins to flower, and 
the meadows to smell of young grass, even in 
the thickest of our streets, the country hill- 
tops find out a young man's eyes, and set his 
heart beating for travel and pure air. 



VII 
THE VILLA QUARTERS 



CHAPTER VII 



THE VILLA Q-UARTERS 



1\ vTR. RUSKIN'S denunciation of the New 
-^^^ Town of Edinburgh includes, as I have 
heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime 
we have to show. Many however find a 
grand air and something settled and imposing 
in the better parts ; and upon many, as I have 
said, the confusion of styles induces an agree- 
able stimulation of the mind. But upon the 
subject of our recent villa architecture, I am 
frankly ready to mingle my tears with Mr. 
Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one 
envious of his large declamatory and contro- 
versial eloquence. 

Day by day, one new villa, one new object 



i82 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

of offence, is added to another ; all around 
Newington and Morningside, the dismallest 
structures keep springing up like mushrooms ; 
the pleasant hills are loaded with them, each 
impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed 
and carrying chimneys like a house. And yet 
a glance of an eye discovers their true character. 
They are not houses ; for they were not de- 
signed with a view to human habitation, and 
the internal arrangements are, as they tell me, 
fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. 
They are not buildings ; for you can scarcely 
say a thing is built where every measurement 
is in clamant disproportion with its neighbour. 
They belong to no style of art, only to a form 
of business much to be regretted. 

Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure 
where the size of the windows bears no rational 
relation to the size of the front ? Is there any 
profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk ? Does a 
hard-working, greedy builder gain more on a 
monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal 



THE VILLA QUARTERS 183 

plainness f Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks 
may be omitted, and green timber employed, 
in the construction of even a very elegant 
design ; and there is no reason w^hy a chimney 
should be made to vent, because it is so 
situated as to look comely from without. On 
the other hand, there is a noble way of being 
ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall or 
Lucifer. There are daring and gaudy build- 
ings that manage to be offensive, without 
being contemptible ; and we know that * fools 
rush in where angels fear to tread.' But to 
aim at making a common-place villa, and to 
make it insufferably ugly in each particular ; 
to attempt the homeliest achievement and to 
attain the bottom of derided failure ; not to 
have any theory but profit and yet, at an 
equal expense, to outstrip all competitors in 
the art of conceiving and rendering permanent 
deformity ; and to do all this in what is, by 
nature, one of the most agreeable neighbour- 
hoods in Britain: — what are we to say, but 



i84 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

that this also is a distinction, hard to earn 
although not greatly worshipful ? 

Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensi- 
tive ; but these things offend the plainest taste. 
It is a danger vv^hich threatens the amenity of 
the town ; and as this eruption keeps spreading 
on our borders, we have ever the farther to 
walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain 
the country air. If the population of Edin- 
burgh were a living, autonomous body, it 
would arise like one man and make night 
hideous with arson ; the builders and their 
accomplices would be driven to work, like 
the Jews of yore, with the trowel in one 
hand and the defensive cutlass in the other; 
and as soon as one of these masonic wonders 
had been consummated, right-minded icono- 
clasts should fall thereon and make an end of 
it at once. 

Possibly these words may meet the eye of 
a builder or two. It is no use asking them 
to employ an architect; for that would be to 



THE VILLA QUARTERS 185 

touch them in a delicate quarter, and its use 
would largely depend on what architect 
they were minded to call in. But let them 
get any architect in the world to point out any 
reasonably well-proportioned villa, not his own 
design ; and let them reproduce that model to 
satiety. 



VIII 
THE C ALTON HILL 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CALTON HILL 

^ I ^HE east of new Edinburgh is guarded 
by a craggy hill, of no great elevation, 
which the town embraces. The old London 
road runs on one side of it ; while the New 
Approach, leaving it on the other hand, com- 
pletes the circuit. You mount by stairs in 
a cutting of the rock to find yourself in a 
field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the 
honours of situation and architecture ; Burns is 
memorialised lower down upon a spur ; Lord 
Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name 
to the topgallant of the Calton Hill. This 
latter erection has been differently and yet, in 
both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and 



190 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

a butterchurn ; comparisons apart, it ranks 
among the vilest of men's handiworks. But 
the chief feature is an unfinished range of 
columns, * the Modern Ruin ' as it has been 
called, an imposing object from far and near, 




The Calton Hill 



and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that 
false air of a Modern Athens v^hich has earned 
for her so many slighting speeches. It was 
meant to be a National Monument ; and its 
present state is a very suitable monument to 
certain national characteristics. The old Ob- 



THE CALTON HILL 191 

servatory — a quaint brown building on the 
edge of the steep — and the new Observatory 
— a classical edifice with a dome — occupy the 
central portion of the summit. All these are 
scattered on a green turf, browsed over by 
some sheep. 

The scene suggests reflections on fame and 
on man's injustice to the dead. You see 
Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely com- 
memorated than Burns. Immediately below, 
in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert 
Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who 
died insane while yet a stripling; and if Dugald 
Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously 
acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet, on the other 
hand, is most unrighteously forgotten. The 
votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all 
ranks in Scotland and more remarkable for 
number than discretion, eagerly suppress all 
mention of the lad who handed to him the 
poetic impulse and, up to the time when he 
grew famous, continued to influence him in 



192 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns 
himself not only acknowledged his debt in a 
fragment of autobiography, but erected a tomb 
over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This 
v^as worthy of an artist, but it was done in 
vain ; and although I think I have read nearly 
all the biographies of Burns, I cannot remember 
one in which the modesty of nature was not 
violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed 
to the credit of his follower's originality. 
There is a kind of gaping admiration that 
would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into 
one, to have a bigger thing to gape at ; and 
a class of men who cannot edit one author 
without disparaging all others. They are in- 
deed mistaken if they think to please the great 
originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right 
with fame, cannot do better than dedicate his 
labours to the memory of Burns, who will be 
the best delighted of the dead. 

Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is 
perhaps the best; since you can see the Castle, 




T<Jm l> flu lie 
eTecU6 by BURNS 

over FE Reus SON'S 
C I\f\VE 

in IIk Canon gate 

CHUHCHYAI\B 



THE CALTON HILL 



195 



which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's 
Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. 
It is the place to stroll on one of those days 
of sunshine and east wind which are so common 
in our more than temperate summer. The 
breeze comes off the sea, with a little of the 
freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to 
the quarter, which is delightful to certain very 
ruddy organizations and greatly the reverse to 
the majority of mankind. It brings with it a 
faint, floating haze, a cunning decolourizer, 
although not thick enough to obscure outlines 
near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly 
to windward at the far end of Musselburgh 
Bay; and over the Links of Aberlady and 
Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass 
Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin 
sea fog. 

Immediately underneath upon the south, you 
command the yards of the High School, and the 
towers and courts of the new Jail — a large place, 
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by 



K 



196 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

itself on the edge of a steep cliff, and often 
joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In 
the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners 
taking exercise like a string of nuns ; in the 
other, schoolboys running at play and their 
shadows keeping step with them. From the 
bottom of the valley, a gigantic chimney rises 
almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a 
shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument. 
Look a little farther, and there is Holyrood 
Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, 
and the red sentry pacing smartly to and fro 
before the door like a mechanical figure in a 
panorama. By way of an outpost, you can 
single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over 
which Rizzio's murderers made their escape 
and where Queen Mary herself, according to 
gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her 
loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's 
Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, 
St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salis- 
bury Crags ; and thence, by knoll and rocky 











■;r% J 









;i-:.<«^^' •""_';> ' 



^i^Ui 










^ \ftfisi9e^.^ 



J.TlBAILLIe: 



THE 

CHAPEL ROYAL. 



THE CALTON HILL 199 

bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to 
the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a 
mountain in virtue of its bold design. This upon 
your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires 
of the Old Town climb one above another to 
where the citadel prints its broad bulk and 
jagged crown of bastions on the western sky. — 
Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon ; and at 
the same instant of time, a ball rises to the 
summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, 
far away, a puff of smoke followed by a report 
bursts from the half-moon battery at the Castle. 
This is the time-gun by which people set their 
watches, as far as the sea coast or in hill farms 
upon the Pentlands. — To complete the view, 
the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with 
traffic, and has a broad look over the valley 
between the Old Town and the New : here, 
full of railway trains and stepped over by the 
high North Bridge upon its many columns, 
and there, green with trees and gardens. 

On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so 



200 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional an out- 
look : and yet even here it commands a striking 
prospect. A gully separates it from the New 
Town. This is Greenside, where witches were 
burned and tournaments held in former days. 
Down that almost precipitous bank, Bothwell 
launched his horse, and so first, as they say, 
attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now 
tesselated with sheets and blankets out to dry, 
and the sound of people beating carpets is 
rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs 
run out to Leith ; Leith camps on the sea- 
side with her forest of masts ; Leith roads are 
full of ships at anchor ; the sun picks out the 
white pharos upon Inchkeith Island; the Firth 
extends on either hand from the Ferry to 
the May; the towns of Fifeshire sit, each in 
its bank of blowing smoke, along the opposite 
coast; and the hills inclose the view, except 
to the farthest east, where the haze of the 
horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies 
the road to Norway : a dear road for Sir 



THE CALTON HILL 203 

Patrick Spens and his Scots Lords ; and yonder 
smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is 
Aberdour, from whence they sailed to seek a 
queen for Scotland. 

' O, lang, lang, may the ladies sit, 
Wi' their fans into their hand, 

Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens 
Come sailing to the land ! ' 

The sight of the sea, even from a city, will 
bring thoughts of storm and sea disaster. The 
sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen 01 
Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, 
but crowding to the tail of the harbour with a 
shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for 
brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or 
boats that have gone on their last fishing. Since 
Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multi- 
tude have gone down in the North Sea ! Yonder 
is Auldhame, where the London smack went 
ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies' 
fingers ; and a few miles round Fife Ness is the 
fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance ; and the 
lee shore to the east of the Inchcape, is that 



204 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

Forfarshire coast where Mucklebackit sorrowed 
for his son. 

These are the main features of the scene 
roughly sketched. How they are all tilted by 
the inclination of the ground, how each stands 
out in delicate relief against the rest, what mani- 
fold detail, and play of sun and shadow, animate 
and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a 
person on the spot, and turning swiftly on his 
heels, to grasp and bind together in one com- 
prehensive look. It is the character of such a 
prospect, to be full of change and of things 
moving. The multiplicity embarrasses the eye ; 
and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to 
grow absorbed with single points. You remark 
a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a 
country road. You turn to the city, and see 
children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at 
play about suburban doorsteps ; you have a 
glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are 
densely moving ; you note ridge after ridge of 
chimney-stacks running downhill one behind 



THE CALTON HILL 207 

another, and church spires rising bravely from 
the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable 
windows, you watch a figure moving ; on one of 
the multitude of roofs, you watch clambering 
chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and 
scatters the smoke ; bells are heard, far and near, 
faint and loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a 
bird goes dipping evenly over the housetops, like 
a gull across the waves. And here you are in 
the meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among 
nibbling sheep and looked upon by monumental 
buildings. 

Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless 
night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a 
star or two set sparsedly in the vault of heaven ; 
and you will find a sight as stimulating as the 
hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude 
seems perfect ; the patient astronomer, flat on 
his back under the Observatory dome and spying 
heaven's secrets, is your only neighbour; and 
yet from all round you there come up the dull 
hum of the city, the tramp of countless people 



2o8 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

marching out of time, the rattle of carriages and 
the continuous keen jingle of the tramway bells. 
An hour or so before, the gas was turned on ; 
lamplighters scoured the city ; in every house, 
from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and 
gleamed forth into the dusk. And so now, 
although the town lies blue and darkling on her 
hills, innumerable spots of the bright element 
shine far and near along the pavements and upon 
the high fafades. Moving lights of the railway 
pass and re-pass below the stationary lights upon 
the bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights 
burn high up in the tall lands and on the Castle 
turrets, they burn low down in Greenside or 
along the Park. They run out one beyond 
the other into the dark country. They walk in 
a procession down to Leith, and shine singly far 
along Leith Pier. Thus, the plan of the city 
and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground 
of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing 
full of pinholes and exposes it before a candle ; 
not the darkest night of winter can conceal her 



THE CALTON HILL 211 

high station and fanciful design ; every evening 
in the year she proceeds to illuminate herself 
in honour of her ov^n beauty ; and as if to 
complete the scheme — or rather as if some 
prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend it 
to the adjacent sea and country — half way 
over to Fife, there is an outpost of light upon 
Inchkeith, and far to seaward, yet another on 
the May. 

And while you are looking, across upon the 
Castle Hill, the drums and bugles begin to recall 
the scattered garrison ; the air thrills with the 
sound ; the bugles sing aloud ; and the last rising 
flourish mounts and melts into the darkness like 
a star : a martial swan-song, fitly rounding in the 
labours of the day. 



IX 
WINTER AND NEW YEAR 



CHAPTER IX 

WINTER AND NEW YEAR 

^ I ^HE Scotch dialect is singularly rich in 
terms of reproach against the winter 
wind. Snelly blae^ nirly, and scowthering, are 
four of these significant vocables; they are 
all words that carry a shiver with them ; and 
for my part as I see them aligned before me 
on the page, I am persuaded that a big wind 
comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland 
and the northern hills ; I think I can hear it 
howl in the chimney, and as I set my face 
northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my 
cheek. Even in the names of places there is 
often a desolate, inhospitable sound; and I 
remember two from the near neighbourhood 



2i6 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

of Edinburgh, Cauldhame and Blaw-weary, 
that would promise but starving comfort to 
their inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, 
vv^hich has thus endowed the language of Scot- 
land with words, has also largely modified the 
spirit of its poetry. Both poverty and a 
northern climate teach men the love of the 
hearth and the sentiment of the family ; and 
the latter, in its own right, inclines a poet to 
the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, 
all our singers have a stave or two for blazing 
fires and stout potations: — to get indoors out 
of the wind and to swallow something hot to 
the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated 
where they dwelt ! 

And this is not only so in country districts 
where the shepherd must wade in the snow 
all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh 
itself, and nowhere more apparently stated 
than in the works of our Edinburgh poet, 
Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take 
it, and willingly slunk from the robustious 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 217 

winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent 
from his life, or only present, if you prefer, 
in such a form that even the least serious of 
Burns's amourettes was ennobling by com- 
parison ; and so there is nothing to temper the 
sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades 
the poor boy's verses. Although it is charac- 
teristic of his native town, and the manners 
of its youth to the present day, this spirit has 
perhaps done something to restrict his popu- 
larity. He recalls a supper-party pleasantry 
with something akin to tenderness ; and 
sounds the praises of the act of drinking as it 
it were virtuous, or at least witty, in itself. 
The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere ot 
tavern parlours, and the revelry of lawyers' 
clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials 
of a rich existence. It was not choice, so 
much as an external fate, that kept Fergusson 
in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of 
poetic temperament, and without religious 
exaltation, drops as if by nature into the 



2i8 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

public-house. The picture may not be pleas- 
ing ; but what else is a man to do in this dog's 
weather ? 

To none but those who have themselves 
suffered the thing in the body, can the gloom 
and depression of our Edinburgh winter be 
brought home. For some constitutions there 
is something almost physically disgusting in 
the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the 
wind wearies, the sickly sky depresses them ; 
and they turn back from their walk to avoid 
the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down 
among perturbed and pallid mists. The days 
are so short that a man does much of his 
business, and certainly all his pleasure, by the 
haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads are 
as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so 
drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often 
wondered how they found the heart to undress. 
And meantime the wind whistles through the 
town as if it were an open meadow ; and if 
you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking 



n 




P^ir- 


-* 


A 



T, M . C (^AvM FD(^t> 



A NIGHT 

WITH FERGUSSON. 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 



221 



and raining overhead with a noise of ship- 
wrecks and of falling houses. In a word, 
life is so unsightly that there are times when 







the heart turns sick in a man's inside ; and 
the look of a tavern, or the thought of the 
warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land to 
one who has been long struggling with the seas. 



222 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

As the weather hardens towards frost, the 
world begins to improve for Edinburgh people. 
We enjoy superb sub-arctic sunsets, with the 
profile of the city stamped in indigo upon a 
sky of luminous green. The wind may still 
be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that 
stirs good blood. People do not all look 
equally sour and downcast. They fall into 
two divisions : one, the knight of the blue 
face and hollow paunch, whom Winter has 
gotten by the vitals ; the other well-lined with 
New-year's fare, conscious of the touch of cold 
on his periphery, but stepping through it by 
the glow of his internal fires. Such an one 
I remember, triply cased in grease, whom 
no extremity of temperature could vanquish. 
* Well,' would be his jovial salutation, * here's 
a sneezer ! ' And the look of these warm 
fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping 
fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class 
who do not depend on corporal advantages, 
but support the winter in virtue of a brave and 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 223 

merry heart. One shivering evening, cold 
enough for frost but with too high a wind, 
and a Httle past sundown, when the lamps 
were beginning to enlarge their circles in the 
growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies were 
seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. 
If the one was as much as nine, the other was 
certainly not more than seven. They were 
miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, 
you would have thought no one could lay a 
naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came 
along waltzing, if you please, while the elder 
sang a tune to give them music. The person 
who saw this, and whose heart was full of 
bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof 
which has been of use to him ever since, and 
which he now hands on, with his good wishes, 
to the reader. 

At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills, 
and all the sloping country, are sheeted up in 
white. If it has happened in the dark hours, 
nurses pluck their children out of bed and 



2 24 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 
run with them to some commanding window, 



■'■^;h h 







'"^'"^"^^Ht^'^kWtV,' 



^'aO^'-'l 



Queen Mary^s Bath 



whence they may see the change that has 
been worked upon earth's face. ' A ' the hills 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 225 

are covered wi' snaw/ they sing, * and Winter's 
noo come fairly ! ' And the children, marvel- 
ling at the silence and the white landscape, 
find a spell appropriate to the season in the 
words. The reverberation of the snow in- 
creases the pale daylight, and brings all objects 
nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth 
and glittering, with here and there the black 
ribbon of a dry-stone dyke, and here and there, 
if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow 
upon a shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden 
creek, that a man might almost jump across, 
between well-powdered Lothian and well- 
powdered Fife. And the effect is not, as in 
other cities, a thing of half a day ; the streets 
are soon trodden black, but the country keeps 
its virgin white ; and you have only to lift your 
eyes and look over miles of country snow. An 
indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the 
city; and the well-fed heart sits lightly and beats 
gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's weather. 
New-year's Day, the great national festival. 



226 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

is a time of family expansions and of deep 
carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate 
for this Calvinistic people, the year's anniver- 
sary falls upon a Sunday, when the public- 
houses are inexorably closed, when singing and 
even whistling is banished from our homes and 
highways, and the oldest toper feels called upon 
to go to church. Thus palled about, as if 
between two loyalties, the Scotch have to 
decide manv nice cases of conscience, and ride 
the marches narrowly between the weekly and 
the annual observance. A party of convivial 
musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung 
suspended in this manner on the brink of 
their diversions. From ten o'clock on Sunday 
night, my friend heard them i ning their 
instruments ; and as the hour of liberty drew 
near, each must have had his music open, his 
bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot 
already raised to mark the time, and his 
nerves braced for execution ; for hardly had 
the twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 227 

Steeple, before they had launched forth into a 
secular bravura. 

Currant loaf is now popular eating in all 
households. For weeks before the great morn- 
ing, confectioners display stacks of Scotch bun 
— a dense, black substance, inimical to life — 
and full moons of shortbread adorned with 
mottoes of peel or sugar-plum in honour of 
the season and the family affections. * Frae 
Auld Reekie,' *A guid New Year to ye aV 
' For the Auld Folk at Hame,' are among the 
most favoured of these devices. Can you not 
see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on 
pinching hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in 
Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor Glen among 
thp rnwnrr,^ -ci the old people receiving the 
pa vi vvii;\ moist evj:i;> ana a pray^^ for Jock 
ui ^ ean in the city ? For at t^isw season on 
the threshold of another year nf calamity ana 
stubborn conflict, men feel a need to drciw 
closer the links that unite them ; they reckon 
the number of their friends, like allies before a 



228 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

war ; and the prayers grow longer in the morn- 
ing as the absent are recommended by name 
into God's keeping. 

On the day itself, the shops are all shut as 
on a Sunday ; only taverns, toy-shops, and other 
holiday magazines, keep open doors. Every 
one looks for his handsel. The postmen and 
the lamplighters have left, at every house in 
their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, 
asking and thanking in a breath; and it is char- 
acteristic of Scotland that these verses may 
have sometimes a touch of reality in detail or 
sentiment and a measure of strength in the 
handling. All over the town, you may see com- 
forter'd schoolboys hastening to squander their 
half-crowns. There are an infinity of visits to 
be paid ; all the worl^ is in the Str;:et, except 
the dain^i-, Glasses ; the sacramental greeting is 
heard upon all sides ; Auld Lang Syne is much 
in people's mouths ; and whisky and short- 
bread are staple articles of consumption. From 
an early hour a stranger will be impressed by 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 229 

the number of drunken men ; and by afternoon 
drunkenness has spread to the women. With 
some 'classes of society it is as much a matter 
of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day as 
to go to church on Sunday. Some have been 
saving their wages for perhaps a month to do 
the season honour. Many carry a whisky- 
bottle in their pocket, which they will press 
with embarrassing effusion on a perfect stranger. 
It is inexpedient to risk one's body in a cab, 
or not, at least, until after a prolonged study 
of the driver. The streets, which are thronged 
from end to end, become a place for delicate 
pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speech- 
less, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries 
of the New Year go meandering in and out 
and cannoning one against another ; and now 
and again, one falls and lies as he has fallen. 
Before night, so many have gone to bed or 
the police office, that the streets seem almost 
clearer. And as guisards and first-footers are 
now not much seen except in country places. 



230 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

when once the New Year has been rung in 
and proclaimed at the Tron raihngs, the festivi- 
ties begin to find their way indoors and some- 
thing Hke quiet returns upon the town. But 
think, in these piled lands^ of all the sense- 
less snorers, all the broken heads and empty 
pockets ! 

Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene 
of heroic snowballing ; and one riot obtained 
the epic honours of military intervention. But 
the great generation, I am afraid, is at an end ; 
and even during my own college days, the spirit 
appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on 
the other hand, are honoured more and more \ 
and curling, being a creature of the national 
genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The 
patriotism that leads a man to eat Scotch bun 
will scarce desert him at the curling-pond. 
Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is 
the proper home of sliders ; many a happy 
urchin can slide the whole way to school; and 
the profession of errand boy is transformed into 



WINTER AND NE W YEAR 



231 



a holiday amusement. As for skating, there is 
scarce any city so handsomely provided. Dud- 
dingstone Loch lies under the abrupt southern 







Duddingstone 

in WinUr 

side of Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of 
blue, with swans sailing from the reeds; in 
winter, a field of ringing ice. The village 
church sits above it on a green promontory; 
and the village smoke rises from among goodly 
trees. At the church gates, is the historical 



232 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

jougy a place of penance for the neck of de- 
tected sinners, and the historical louping-on 
stanCy from which Dutch-built lairds and 
farmers climbed into the saddle. Here Prince 
Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans ; 
and here Deacon Brodie, or one of his gang, 
stole a plough coulter before the burglary in 
Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the 
loch, the ground rises to Craigmillar Castle, 
a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is 
worth a climb, even in summer, to look down 
upon the loch from Arthur's Seat; but it is 
tenfold more so on a day of skating. The 
surface is thick with people moving easily and 
swiftly and leaning over at a thousand graceful 
inclinations ; the crowd opens and closes, and 
keeps moving through itself like water; and 
the ice rings to half a mile away, with the 
flying steel. As night draws on, the single 
figures melt into the dusk, until only an ob- 
scure stir and coming and going of black 
clusters, is visible upon the loch. A little 







CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE. 



WINTER AND NEW YEAR 235 

longer, and the first torch Is kindled and 
begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring 
of yellow reflection, and this is followed by 
another and another, until the whole field is 
full of skimming lights. 



X 

TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 



CHAPTER X 

TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 

/^N three sides of Edinburgh, the country 
slopes downward from the city, here to 
the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, 
there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow. On 
the south alone, it keeps rising until it not 
only out-tops the Castle but looks down on 
Arthur's Seat. The character of the neigh- 
bourhood is pretty strongly marked by a 
scarcity of hedges ; by many stone walls of 
varying height ; by a fair amount of timber, 
some of it well grown, but apt to be of a 
bushy, northern profile and poor in foliage; 
by here and there a little river, Esk or Leith 
or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of 

M 



240 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

its glen ; and from almost every point, by a 
peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack 
of variety, and yet most of the elements are 
common to all parts ; and the southern district 
is alone distinguished by considerable summits 
and a wide view. 

From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish 
army encamped before Flodden, the road de- 
scends a long hill, at the bottom of which and 
just as it is preparing to mount upon the other 
side, it passes a toll-bar and issues at once into 
the open country. Even as I write these 
words, they are being antiquated in the pro- 
gress of events, and the chisels are tinkling on 
a new row of houses. The builders have at 
length adventured beyond the toll which held 
them in respect so long, and proceed to career 
in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts 
turned loose. As Lord Beaconsfield proposed 
to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a 
man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines 
a similar example to deter the builders ; for it 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 241 

seems as if it must come to an open fight at 
last to preserve a corner of green country un- 
bedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, 
there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, 
with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to 
be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the 
roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. 
People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and 
sought to persuade others, that this stone was 
never dry. And no wonder, they would add, 
for the two men had only stolen fourpence 
between them. 

For about two miles the road climbs up- 
wards, a long hot walk in summer time. You 
reach the summit at a place where four ways 
meet, beside the toll of Fairmilehead. The 
spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and 
aspect. The hills are close by across a valley : 
Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible 
as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on this 
side : with wood and tilled field running high 
upon their borders, and haunches all moulded 



242 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

into innumerable glens and shelvlngs and varie- 
gated with heather and fern. The air comes 
briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the 
elevation and rustically scented by the upland 
plants ; and even at the toll, you may hear the 
curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, 
when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the 
birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream 
together in the same field by Fairmilehead. 
The winged, wild things intermix their wheel- 
ings, the seabirds skim the tree-tops and fish 
among the furrows of the plough. These little 
craft of air are at home in all the world, so 
long as they cruise in their own element ; and 
like sailors, ask but food and water from the 
shores they coast. 

Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow 
Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but once a distillery 
of whisky. It chanced, some time in the 
past century, that the distiller was on terms of 
good-fellowship with the visiting officer of 
excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 243 

disposition and a master of convivial arts. Now 
and again, he had to v^alk out of Edinburgh 
to measure the distiller's stock ; and although 
it was agreeable to find his business lead him 
in a friend's direction, it was unfortunate that 
the friend should be a loser by his visits. Ac- 
cordingly, when he got about the level of 
Fairmilehead, the gauger would take his flute, 
without which he never travelled, from his 
pocket, fit it together, and set manfully to 
playing, as if for his own delectation and 
inspired by the beauty of the scene. His 
favourite air, it seems, was * Over the hills 
and far away.' At the first note, the distiller 
pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead ? 
and playing * Over the hills and far away.?' 
This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger. 
Instantly, horses were harnessed, and sundry 
barrels of whisky were got upon a cart, driven 
at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in the 
mossy glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same 
breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl was put 



244 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for 
the back parlour. A Httle after, the gauger, 
having had his fill of music for the moment, 
came strolling down with the most innocent 
air imaginable, and found the good people at 
Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his 
arrival, but none the less glad to see him. 
The distiller's liquor and the ganger's flute would 
combine to speed the moments of digestion ; 
and when both were somewhat mellow, they 
would wind up the evening with * Over the 
hills and far away ' to an accompaniment ot 
knowing glances. And at least, there is a 
smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic 
features. 

A little further, the road to the right passes 
an upright stone in a field. The country 
people call it General Kay's monument. Ac- 
cording to them, an officer of that name had 
perished there in battle at some indistinct 
period before the beginning of history. The 
date is reassuring ; for I think cautious writers 
are silent on the General's exploits. But the 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 245 

Stone is connected with one of those remarkable 
tenures of land which linger on into the modern 
world from Feudalism. Whenever the reigning 
sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor 
is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet 
in hand, and sound a flourish according to the 
measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily 
for a respectable family, crowned heads have 
no great business in the Pentland Hills. But 
the story lends a character of comicality to 
the stone ; and the passer-by will sometimes 
chuckle to himself. 

The district is dear to the superstitious. 
Hard by, at the back-gate of Comiston, a 
belated carter beheld a lady in white, *with 
the most beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet,' 
who looked upon him in a very ghastly manner 
and then vanished ; and just in front is the 
Hunters' Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not 
so long ago haunted by the devil in person. 
Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. 
He shook the four corners of the building with 
lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and 



246 PICTURESQUE NOTES QN EDINBURGH 

windows, overthrew crockery in the dead hours 
of the morning, and danced unholy dances on 
the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant 
was put in requisition ; chosen ministers were 
summoned out of Edinburgh and prayed by 
the hour ; pious neighbours sat up all night 
making a noise of psalmody ; but Satan minded 
them no more than the wind about the hill- 
tops ; and it was only after years of perse- 
cution, that he left the Hunters' Tryst in 
peace to occupy himself with the remainder ot 
mankind. What with General Kay, and the 
white lady, and this singular visitation, the 
neighbourhood offers great facilities to the 
makers of sun-myths ; and without exactly 
casting in one's lot with that disenchanting 
school of writers, one cannot help hearing a 
good deal of the winter wind in the last story. 
* That nicht,' says Burns, in one of his happiest 
moments, — 

* That nicht a child might understand 
The deil had business on his hand.' 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 247 

And if people sit up all night in lone places 
on the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, 
they will be apt to hear some of the most 
fiendish noises in the world : the wind will 
beat on doors and dance upon roofs for them, 
and make the hills howl around their cottage 
with a clamour like the judgment-day. 

The road goes down through another valley, 
and then finally begins to scale the main slope 
of the Pentlands A bouquet of old trees 
stands round a white farmhouse; and from a 
neighbouring dell, you can see smoke rising 
and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight 
above, the hills climb a thousand feet into 
the air. The neighbourhood, about the time 
of lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of 
flocks ; and you will be awakened, in the grey 
of early summer mornings, by the barking of 
a dog or the voice of a shepherd shouting 
to the echoes. This, with the hamlet lying 
behind unseen, is Swanston. 

The place in the dell is immediately con- 



248 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

nected with the city. Long ago this sheltered 
field was purchased by the Edinburgh magis- 
trates for the sake of the springs that rise or 
gather there. After they had built their 
water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred 
to them that the place was suitable for junket- 
ing. Once entertained, with jovial magistrates 
and public funds, the idea led speedily to 
accomplishment; and Edinburgh could soon 
boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The 
dell was turned into a garden ; and on the 
knoll that shelters it from the plain and the 
sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the 
hills. They brought crockets and gargoyles 
from old St. Giles's which they were then 
restoring, and disposed them on the gables 
and over the door and about the garden ; 
and the quarry which had supplied them 
with building material, they draped with 
clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. 
So much for the pleasure of the eye ; for 
creature comfort, they made a capacious 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 249 

cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins 
of the hewn stone. In process of time, the 
trees grew higher and gave shade to the 
cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and 
turned the dell into a thicket. There, purple 
magistrates relaxed themselves from the pur- 
suit of municipal ambition ; cocked hats 
paraded soberly about the garden and in 
and out among the hollies ; authoritative canes 
drew ciphering upon the path ; and at night, 
from high upon the hills, a shepherd saw 
lighted windows through the foliage and heard 
the voice of city dignitaries raised in song. 

The farm is older. It was first a grange of 
Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and inhabited by rosy 
friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it 
passed into the hands of a true-blue Protestant 
family. During the covenanting troubles, 
when a night conventicle was held upon the 
Pentlands, the farm doors stood hospitably 
open till the morning ; the dresser was laden 
with cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; 



250 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

and the worshippers kept slipping down from 
the hill between two exercises, as couples 
visit the supper-room between two dances of a 




, **^«!p 

Swanston ^ ^ <'■ ' 
Cottage 



modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some forag- 
ing Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army- 
fell upon Swanston in the dawn. The great- 
grandfather of the late farmer was then a little 



TO THE FENTLAND HILLS 251 

child; him they awakened by plucking the 
blankets from his bed, and he remembered, 
when he was an old man, their truculent looks 
and uncouth speech. The churn stood full of 
cream in the dairy, and with this they made 
their brose in high delight. * It was braw 
brose,' said one of them. At last, they made 
off, laden like camels with their booty; and 
Swanston Farm has lain out of the way of 
history from that time forward. I do not 
know what may be yet in store for it. 
On dark days, when the mist runs low upon 
the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suit- 
able for private tragedy. But in hot July, you 
can fancy nothing more perfect than the 
garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and 
bright, old-fashioned flowerpots, and ending 
in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and moss 
and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the 
sun under fathoms of broad foliage. 

The hamlet behind is one of the least con- 
siderable of hamlets, and consists of a few 



252^ PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of 
them (a strange thing in Scotland) are models 
of internal neatness ; the beds adorned with 
patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow- 




rARM 



pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with 
scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very kettle 
polished like silver. It is the sign of a con- 
tented old age in country places, where there 
is little matter for gossip and no street sights. 
Housework becomes an art; and at evening. 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 253 

when the cottage interior shines and twinkles 
in the glow of the fire, the housewife folds 
her hands and contemplates her finished pic- 
ture ; the snow and the wind may do their 
worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner 
in the world. The city might be a thousand 
miles away : and yet it was from close by that 
Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edin- 
burgh which has been engraved for this collec- 
tion : and you have only to look at the etching,^ 
to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill 
people are not easily sophisticated ; and if you 
walk out here on a summer Sunday, it is as 
like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon 
you. But keep an unmoved countenance; 
they look formidable at the charge, but their 
hearts are in the right place; and they will 
only bark and sprawl about you on the grass, 
unmindful of their master's excitations. 

Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastera angle 
of the range ; thence, the Pentlands trend oif 

* Published in the first edition. 



254 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

to south and west. From the summit you 
look over a great expanse of champaign sloping 
to the sea and behold a large variety of distant 
hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills or 
Peebles, the Lammermoors and the Ochils, 
more or less mountainous in outline, more or 




Arthur*! Seat 



less blue v^ith distance. Of the Pentlands 
themselves, you see a field of v^ild heathery 
peaks v\^ith a pond gleaming in the midst ; and 
to that side the view is as desolate as if you 
were looking into Galloway or Applecross. To 
turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 255 

Far out in the lowlands Edinburgh shows her- 
self, making a great smoke on clear days and 
spreading her suburbs about her for miles ; the 
Castle rises darkly in the midst ; and close by, 
Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in the land- 
scape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, 
and smoking villages, and white country roads, 
diversify the uneven surface of the land. 
Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway 
lines ; little ships are tacking in the Firth ; 
the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large 
as a parish, travels before the wind ; the wind 
itself ruffles the wood and standing corn, and 
sends pulses of varying colour across the land- 
scape. So you sit, like Jupiter upon Olympus, 
and look down from afar upon men's life. The 
city is as silent as a city of the dead: from 
all its humming thoroughfares, not a voice, 
not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill. The 
sea surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams 
and the mill-wheels, the birds and the wind, 
keep up an animated concert through the plain; 

N 



2 56 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks 
contend together in defiance; and yet from 
this Olympian station, except for the whisper- 
ing rumour of a train, the world has fallen 
into a dead silence and the business of town 
and country grown voiceless in your ears. A 
crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind 
singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to 
interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness ; but 
to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes a 
music at once human and rural, and discourses 
pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The 
spiry habitable city, ships, the divided fields, 
and browsing herds, and the straight highways, 
tell visibly of man's active and comfortable 
ways ; and you may be never so laggard 
and never so unimpressionable, but there is 
something in the view that spirits up your 
blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful 
labour. 

Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of 
roof and a smoking chimney, where two roads. 



TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 257 

no thicker than packthread. Intersect beside a 
hanging wood. If you are fanciful, you will 
be reminded of the ganger in the story. And 
the thought of this old exciseman, who once 
lipped and fingered on his pipe and uttered 
clear notes from it in the mountain air, and 
the words of the song he affected, carry your 
mind ' Over the hills and far away ' to distant 
countries ; and you have a vision of Edinburgh 
not, as you see her, in the midst of a little 
neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round 
world with all Europe and the deep sea for 
her surroundings. For every place is a centre 
to the earth, whence highways radiate or ships 
set sail for foreign ports ; the limit of a 
parish is not more imaginary than the frontier 
of an empire ; and as a man sitting at home 
in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a 
city sends abroad an influence and a portrait 
of herself. There is no Edinburgh emigrant, 
far or near, from China to Peru, but he or 
she carries some lively pictures of the mind, 



258 PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH 

some sunset behind the Castle cliffs, some snow 
scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in 
the memory and delightful to study in the 
intervals of toil. For any such, if this book 
fall in their way, here are a few more home 
pictures. It would be pleasant, if they should 
recognise a house where they had dwelt, or a 
walk that they had taken. 



THE END 



Richard Clay &" Sons, Litniied^ London ana Bungay* 



